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Britain to test 1,00,000 people for coronavirus to check spread

Britain to test 1,00,000 people for coronavirus to check spread

Coronavirus in London, UK

The United Kingdon has planned to test a randomly chosen group of 1,00,000 people for the novel coronavirus in order to understand the infection rates better. This is being done as the country is set to ease restrictions due to the coronavirus-induced lockdown.

Britain's government is due to review next week whether to relax a nationwide lockdown brought in on March 23 to slow the spread of the coronavirus, which has so far killed more than 26,000 people in the country.

The tests to see if people are currently infected with the deadly virus, led by London's Imperial College and polling company Ipsos MORI, follow a separate testing programme announced last week by the University of Oxford and the Office for National Statistics.

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Britain has suffered from limited testing capacity and Health Minister Matt Hancock promised to increase the number of tests to 1,00,000 a day by the end of April.

On Tuesday, just over 52,000 tests were carried out.

The Imperial College programme will shortly contact 1,00,000 people across England at random and send them self-testing kits to see if they are infected.

A later part of the study will test the public's ability to self-administer antibody tests that show whether someone has had COVID-19 but is no longer infected, which may confer some immunity against the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.