POLICE, fire sevices and prison staff will be able to get coronavirus tests from today, Matt Hancock has said.
The Health Secretary revealed that the country has the capacity to test up to 30,000 a day, but not all those slots are being used.
And he said he hoped to be able to expand it to everyone who had symptoms of the disease “soon”.
Mr Hancock told the Health and Social Care Committee this morning: “I can today expand that eligibility to police, fire service, prison staff, critical Local Authority staff, the judiciary and DWP staff who need it.
“We can do that because of the scale up of testing.”
And he also revealed today that ministers considered just putting in place a London lockdown – but ultimately decided against it.
He told MPs today on a virtual Parliament hearing: “We did consider having a London specific lockdown and decided it was better to do it across the country as a whole.
“To separate off one part of the country from the rest has downsides in national unity.”
Meanwhile, health experts warned today that up to 40,000 Brits could die in the first wave of coronavirus.
Professor Anthony Costello, of the UCL Institute for Global Health, said the UK could endure up to nine more waves after lockdown measures are relaxed.
He told the Health Select Committee: “This wave could see 40,000 deaths by the time it’s over.
“If we are going to suppress the chain of transmission we all hope lockdown and social distancing will bring about a large suppression of the epidemic so far.
“But we will face further waves.
“And so we need to make sure that we have a system in place that cannot just do a certain number of tests in the laboratory, but has a system at district and community level.”
He added the “harsh reality” is that “we were too slow with a number of things” which may have led the UK to have “probably the highest death rates in Europe”.
But Prof Costello said we “should not have any blame at this stage”.
“We can make sure in the second wave we’re not too slow,” he said.
Yesterday, the death toll in the UK passed the 13,000 mark with more than 100,000 people infected.
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