Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the proportion of people who receive a positive result to a PCR test under (a) Pillar 1 and (b) Pillar 2 of the Government’s covid-19 testing programme who are infectious with covid-19 at the time the tests are taken.

Data on the number of PCR tests conducted and positive and negative results by pillars 1 and 2 are available at the following link:

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/testing

We have made no assessment of the proportion of people who test positive who may be infectious at the time they are tested.