Around one million people are self-isolating amid the spread of the omicron variant, a minister confirmed today.
Care minister Gillian Keegan made the comments amid hints that Covid testing rules could be relaxed in a bid to combat the chaos caused by thousands of key workers stuck in self-isolation.
Concerns have been raised over delayed bin collections, cancelled trains, care homes in “red alert” and some hospitals forced to suspend non-urgent surgeries.
Keegan told Sky News: “We don’t actually collect that data on a daily basis but it’s obvious if you look at how many people tested positive yesterday, it’s about 215,000, that they’ll all be self isolating and obviously from the previous days, so it’s about a million people probably are self-isolating right now.”
The minister also hinted that PCR confirmation of lateral flow tests was set to be dropped, telling LBC the government was “looking at what makes sense” with a decision expected “in the next day or so”.
It comes after reports suggested that people who test positive on lateral flow tests will be told they do not need to take follow-up PCR tests, which can delay the official start of isolation.
Officials have been told to draw up plans to limit PCR tests to those with Covid symptoms, The Telegraph reported.
Dr Mike Tildesley, from the University of Warwick and a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Modelling group (Spi-M), told BBC Breakfast that lateral flows were very accurate when it came to recording a positive result.
He said: “Of course, with a PCR test what happens is a number of those can get sent away for sequencing and then you get more information regarding the virus itself.
“So, that sort of information may potentially be lost, but only a subset of those PCR tests are sent away for sequencing anyway, so, hopefully, we won’t be losing the levels of information that we already have in this country that enables us to identify variants and so forth.”
However, he said it was “very, very important” that if any changes were brought in on PCR testing that people still recorded their results from lateral flows.
During a press conference on Tuesday, England’s chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty said lateral flow tests were a “very good guide actually to whether someone is at that moment infectious”.