Whole cities and towns to be tested in case of local Covid outbreak using 90 minute procedure

Entire cities will be tested for Covid to contain local outbreaks using on-the-spot tests that give results in just 90 minutes.

Starting next week, the tests will be routinely used to check hospital and care home staff and patients, but there are plans for more than a million tests a day by the time winter arrives.

Ministers believe the revolutionary new tests, which can be processed by portable machines, will see off the danger of another national lockdown by enabling them to test everyone living in towns or cities where there is an outbreak, swiftly isolating those who have the virus.

Until now, tests have had to be sent off to laboratories, often by post, where they then take a minimum of four hours to process, meaning a 24-hour turnaround time is the gold standard.

By processing tests on the spot, much larger numbers of people can be tested much more quickly, allowing the swiftest possible action to contain outbreaks at source.

They are likely to be used at airports to screen out people with Covid as they enter the country and could be used to cut quarantine times.

Teachers will also be randomly tested to determine whether reopening schools in September has any effect on transmission rates.

The tests can detect flu as well as Covid, meaning people who have Covid-like symptoms will know whether they are suffering from the more common illness and can avoid self-isolating. It follows a successful pilot of the 90-minute tests in Southampton.

The first of the tests to come on stream, supplied by Oxfordshire-based Oxford Nanopore, will be able to process 15,000 tests per day on a portable desktop machine, or 2,000 tests per day using a handheld machine. They do not require scientific experts to operate them, meaning the Government can train lay people to operate as many machines as are needed. The first batch of 450,000 tests will be available from next week.

From September, a DNA-based test, supplied by London-based DnaNudge, will be rolled out across NHS hospitals, with 5.8 million tests already on order. It uses nose swabs to test for Covid and is already in use in eight London hospitals. The Government has bought 5,000 of its diagnostic machines. Other rapid-turnaround tests are expected to be ordered from other firms in the coming weeks.

The new tests are on top of the 500,000 tests per day target the Government set for the end of October.

A senior Government source said: “This will enable us to massively ramp up testing in the coming months, and it will mean that we can test entire towns or cities to prevent the need for wider lockdowns. If we had already had this in place when the outbreak happened in Blackburn, we could have tested everyone in Blackburn, contained the virus and avoided having to reimpose lockdown measures on neighbouring towns.

“The sheer number of tests we will be able to do will also cut down quarantine for travellers because we will be able to test them on arrival and again at eight days, allowing them out of quarantine after 10 days instead of 14.”

In pilot schemes the tests already enable hospitals to test patients on arrival at A&E, in maternity and cancer wards to stop the spread of the virus among the most vulnerable, and in care homes they enable staff and patients to find out in 90 minutes, or even as little as an hour in some cases, whether they have the virus.

Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said: “Millions of new rapid Covid tests will provide on the spot results in under 90 minutes, helping us to break chains of transmission quickly.

“The fact these tests can detect flu as well as Covid will be hugely beneficial as we head into winter, so patients can follow the right advice to protect themselves and others.”

The new tests were announced after the department denied that it had abandoned its pledge to regularly test care home residents through the summer following a leaked memo from Professor Jane Cummings, the Government’s adult social care testing director.

According to the Sunday Times, Prof Cummings wrote to local authority leaders to inform them that “previously advised timelines for rolling out regular testing in care homes” were being altered because of “unexpected delays”.

Regular testing of residents and staff was meant to have started on July 6 but will now be pushed back until September 7 for older people and those with dementia.

A department spokeswoman confirmed there were issues with “asymptomatic re-testing”.