Over-65s and those who work outside the home will be able to get tested for coronavirus if they have symptoms, in a huge expansion of the eligibility criteria announced by the health secretary.
As the government seeks to hit its target of 100,000 tests a day, Matt Hancock said all NHS staff, hospital patients, care home workers and their elderly residents would be able to book tests even if they did not have symptoms.
Speaking at the Downing Street daily press conference, Hancock also promised that figures on deaths in care homes and the community would be published daily from Wednesday. This follows criticism that they have been separate from the main daily numbers on hospital deaths.
The expansion of eligibility for testing will be important for the government’s ability to ease lockdown measures.
Hancock said there was no way the lockdown could be lifted yet, but slides presented at the No 10 daily press conference suggested the government had slightly loosened the criteria for when it may be possible.
One of the five key tests for restrictions to be eased is that there will be no risk of a second peak of infections, but this was changed on one of the slides to say no risk of a second peak that overwhelms the NHS. No 10 insisted this had always been the case.
Asked by a member of the public at Tuesday’s press conference about when schools could possibly return to normal, Hancock said: “There are still too many deaths each day and the five tests that we set out haven’t been met.
“I know, especially as a father of three young children, that there’s a yearning from people to know when schools might go back and, of course, it’s something that we think about and we talk about.”
He was also sceptical about the use of face masks in public, after Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, announced she was recommending them in enclosed public places and transport in Scotland. The UK government has been considering advice from the scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) for almost a week, without changing its position so far.
Hancock said the government position had not changed on face masks, and said there was “weak science” on their use.
Prof Angela McLean, the deputy chief scientific adviser, confirmed that Sage advised there was “weak evidence of a small effect” in which a face mask could prevent an infected person passing coronavirus on to others.
“Under our current circumstances, anybody who has symptoms really must stay at home … but we are also concerned that some people are infected who don’t have symptoms, or maybe don’t have symptoms yet, and that is the reason that Sage has put so much effort into looking at this question,” she said.
“But the answer is clear that the evidence is weak and the effect is small, and we have passed that on to our colleagues in government with which to make a decision.”
Hancock did, however, express optimism that the government was on track to meet the goal of 100,000 tests a day and now had the capacity to carry out more than 70,000 tests a day.
He said the dispatch of home test kits would be expanded to 25,000 a day by the end of the week while mobile testing units manned by the army would total more than 70 within the same timeframe.
“All of this has led to an increase in daily testing capacity, which now stands at 73,400. This has allowed us progressively to expand access to testing,” he added.
Hancock also gave an update on treatments for coronavirus, revealing that an existing drug was entering an early clinical trial phase.
He said a UK therapeutics taskforce, which is working to see whether current drugs can be effectively deployed against the disease, have identified a number of “promising candidates”.
“Currently, six different treatments have been entered into national clinical trials and the first is ready to enter the next stage, a new early phase clinical trial platform that we’re launching today.”
