Covid-19 Update

Bob Blackman Excerpts

Monday 19th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I certainly agree with the hon. Lady on her final point, on international collaboration and working together, which, along with the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, we are working incredibly hard on. We are using the UK’s presidency of the G7 and the enthusiasm of the new Administration in Washington to try to drive international collaboration, in particular collaboration among like-minded democracies in favour of an open and transparent, science-led response to pandemics. I hope that she will concur with that approach.

On the new variants of concern, it is important when looking at the numbers to distinguish between community spread and spread connected to travel. By taking the action that I have just announced to put India on the red list, we are restricting yet further the likelihood of incursion from India of somebody with a new variant. However, the majority of the cases that we have seen already in this country have been picked up by the testing that we have in place now for every single passenger entering this country. That is a sign of the system working, and it is now being strengthened.

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con) [V]]

I am delighted to say that I have had my second dose of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine and, so far, no ill effects. In Harrow, we have had surge testing because we have had a relatively small number of cases of the South African variant discovered. Literally thousands of people have been tested, but one of the most frustrating things is that these tests then have to be sent off and there appears to be an extremely long turnaround time before we get the results. What can the Secretary of State do to speed up getting the results of these tests? Otherwise, people will not be aware of whether they have the variant or whether they should take particular actions.

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise this important issue. I know that this is an important announcement for him and his constituents, representing as he does a significant number of constituents from the Indian diaspora. We have managed to reduce somewhat the turnaround time for the sequencing of positive tests, but we are also introducing a new type of test that can detect not just whether someone is positive but whether they have one of the known variants without having to go through a full sequence. That can give us a snapshot much, much faster—within a matter of hours—of whether a positive result has one of the known variants, before sending it off to sequencing so that we can see any new variant that we do not know about. We are introducing that technology. It is starting in the Lighthouse lab testing facility in Glasgow and we are rolling it out across the system. It is an important tool to make sure that we can get the turnaround time of spotting the variants down faster.