Coronavirus: Disease Control

(asked on 16th March 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how the Government will assess whether the steps being taken are delaying the spread of covid-19 in the absence of full testing.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 24th March 2020

Since February, the Government has had a sophisticated surveillance programme in place to test for COVID-19.

In addition to having expanded testing more generally, and continuing to do so, Public Health England specifically tests a sample of the population in order to assess the level of virus circulating in the community.

This helps us to understand what proportion of the population is affected at a given time and is used by modellers to estimate where we are in the pandemic and to assess the impact of the steps that have been taken.

Reticulating Splines