Yvette Cooper
Main Page: Yvette Cooper (Labour - Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley)Department Debates - View all Yvette Cooper's debates with the Cabinet Office
(4 years ago)
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The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is spot on. It is so important to avoid an uncontained second wave in order to protect the NHS, and allow the treatments and therapies for other non-covid afflictions to continue.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
Just a month ago, the Prime Minister described his moonshot plan, under which millions of tests would be done and returned every day. He said,
“if everything comes together, it may be possible even for challenging sectors like theatres to have life much closer to normal before Christmas.”
Families are now feeling that a normal Christmas is further away than ever, and local health officials in our area have said that people are waiting for six days, not a day, to get their test results. If we could come back from the moon and get back to what is happening on planet Earth, when will he have enough testing capacity in place so that my constituents can get their results in 24 hours?
The Prime Minister
The daily test process has gone up by 34% just in the last month, and daily capacity has gone up by 28%. As the right hon. Lady knows, by the end of this month, NHS Test and Trace is confident that it will be doing 500,000 tests—it will have capacity, I should say, for 500,000 tests a day.