Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what proportion of tests in the Liverpool mass covid-19 testing programme have returned positive results; and how that rate compares with the positive test rate found by national pillar 1 and pillar 2 testing.

In the first phase of the community testing pilot from 6 November to 9 December 2020, 25% of 498,000 residents took up lateral flow tests (LFTs) and 36% took up LFT or polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests. 897 individuals were identified as positive via LFT and 2,902 via PCR. Comparable national testing data is not available.