Covid: Surge testing for Delta variant in Bradford, Canterbury and Maidstone

Expansion comes as experts push ministers to postpone full reopening of English society

Surge testing is being deployed across Bradford, Canterbury and Maidstone, as health authorities battle to prevent the highly infectious Covid-19 Delta variant from sweeping across the country.

People living and working in those areas – including children aged 12 and over in Canterbury and those aged 11 and over in Bradford – are being urged to take a PCR test even if they do not have symptoms.

Officials from NHS Test and Trace and local councils will carry out the additional testing and genomic sequencing across these areas, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said.

The expansion of surge testing comes after a small number of confirmed cases of the Delta variant, B1.617.2, of coronavirus were detected in those areas. All affected people have been told to isolate and their contacts have been identified, the DHSC said.

Along with increased testing, “enhanced contact tracing”, where tracers look back over a longer period of time to determine routes of transmission, will be used for those who test positive for a variant of concern.

People who have symptoms can book free tests on their council’s website or by phone. People without symptoms should check their local authority’s website for information on where to get tested, the DHSC said.

The Delta variant, first identified in India, has now become the dominant variant across most of the UK.

And data from the Office for National Statistics show the number of Covid-19 infections in the community has almost doubled in a week.

For the week to 29 May, 85,600 people in England had the virus, equivalent to one in 640 people and up from 48,500 people or one in 1,120 the previous week.

It is the highest level of community infections since the week ending 16 April.

It comes as experts from the Independent Sage group urged Boris Johnson to “pause” the lifting of the final Covid restrictions on 21 June in order to avoid a lockdown later down the line.

In a statement, the committee said there was increasing evidence that the Delta variant has “spread widely across the UK and is continuing to spread, that it has higher infectivity than the previous circulating variant, and that it is more likely to cause disease and hospitalisation”.