Tests will be provided through a partnership between Liverpool City Council, NHS Test and Trace and the Ministry of Defence, with logistical support from Armed Forces personnel.
- Prime Minister announces new whole city testing approach to launch in Liverpool from Friday with hundreds of thousands of new, rapid turnaround tests deployed
- All residents and workers will be offered repeat COVID-19 testing, even if asymptomatic, to find more positive cases and break chains of transmission
- Tests to be provided through a partnership between Liverpool City Council, NHS Test and Trace and Ministry of Defence, with logistical support from Armed Forces personnel
Everyone living or working in Liverpool will now be offered COVID-19 testing, whether they have symptoms or not, in the first pilot of whole city testing in England made possible by the dramatic increase in testing capacity and new technologies.
At the request of and in close collaboration with local leaders, the Prime Minister is announcing the first deployment of whole city testing in order to help support the local area to find even more people with coronavirus to control the spread of the virus and gain more data on the number of cases across the city, which are already among the highest per 100,000 in the UK. Testing will begin this week.
Residents and workers will be tested using a combination of existing swab tests, as well as new lateral flow tests which can rapidly turn around results within an hour without the need to be processed in a lab, as well as LAMP* technology due to be deployed in Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust for NHS staff.
The pilot will help to inform a blueprint for how mass testing can be achieved and how fast and reliable COVID-19 testing can be delivered at scale.
*A new type of testing technology which stands for loop mediated isothermal amplification