Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans he has to develop antibody testing for covid-19.

Testing is a crucial part of the United Kingdom’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Government is working on multiple fronts to deliver additional testing capacity into the system. On 4 April 2020, the Government published its testing strategy 'Coronavirus (COVID-19) Scaling up our testing programmes'. The strategy describes in detail the five pillars of work which together will put in place the testing that is mission critical as we fight the battle against COVID-19.

The Government is also currently evaluating antibody tests. These tests could be home-based tests that could allow people to find out whether they have had the virus and are now immune, enabling them to go back to work. However, before these tests can be deployed, further work will be conducted to ensure that the antibody tests currently available are capable of this.