Coronavirus testing: What is the UK government's plan?

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced plans to test more people for coronavirus.

At the moment only people in hospital are being routinely tested, so if you have symptoms and you are not sure if you have the virus, you may well never know.

As of 18 March, 56,221 people in the UK had been tested for coronavirus. The number of tests has been rising from just over 1,000 a day at the end of February, when testing began, to more than 6,000 per day by mid-March.

The government plans to increase this to 10,000 a day initially, with a goal of reaching 25,000 tests a day. But it has been criticised by some experts for not testing widely enough, and people have been complaining online about not having access to tests despite having symptoms.

Public Health England says it will do some surveillance testing on a local level if clusters of cases are identified, using a network of 100 designated GP surgeries. This is to try to get a sense of how many milder cases there are in the community that do not result in hospitalisation.

But the UK is not currently doing any mass surveillance testing or actively tracing people who have come into contact with known cases

The Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he had a "simple message" for all countries: "Test, test, test."

He added: "We cannot stop this pandemic if we do not know who is infected."

The UK's chief scientific officer Sir Patrick Vallance told a group of MPs that "we simply don't have mass testing available for the population now", and that "when you only have capacity to do a certain number of tests" you have to prioritise the most vulnerable groups.

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Source: BBC News, 19 March 2020