Coronavirus: Screening

(asked on 16th December 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to increase PCR testing capacity following the rise in Omicron covid-19 variant cases.


Answered by
Maggie Throup Portrait
Maggie Throup
This question was answered on 26th January 2022

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the National Health Service and the UK Health Security Agency have built a United Kingdom wide laboratory network with capacity to process 848,000 polymerase chain reaction tests per day. Following the spread of the Omicron variant, we increased testing capacity by 200,000 tests per day. Some of this capacity came online the week commencing 20 December. We have also transitioned to the new Omicron mutation target assay in nine of our ten labs (as of 10 December), providing 3-4 times increased capacity and detection.

Reticulating Splines