To contain the new outbreaks, residents in eight areas of the country will now be tested whether or not they are showing symptoms, a process known as “surge testing”.
There are about 10,000 people in each area. Three are in London, two in the southeast, one in central England, one in the east and another in the northwest.
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UK Health Minister, Matt Hancock, said those in the affected areas needed to comply with the request to be tested, even if they are asymptomatic, to break any chain of transmission.
“There’s currently no evidence to suggest this variant is any more severe,” he said. “But we need to come down on it hard, and we will.”
Public Health England’s Managing Director Susan Hopkins said the cases did not appear linked.
“They’re more likely to be related to somebody who potentially had [an] asymptomatic infection when they came in from abroad,” she said at a news conference.
Britain is battling a new wave of COVID-19 turbocharged by the emergence in September of a more transmissible variant found in the southeast of England.
The country’s official death toll passed 100,000 last week.
Britain is, however, making rapid progress in its vaccination programme, with nearly 9.3 million people having received the first shot of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Oxford-AstraZeneca shot.
(On the topic of variants: if you’d like to better understand where they come from, the risks they pose and the way they will affect our vaccines, science reporter Liam Mannix has put together a handy explainer which you can find here.)
Reuters
