Coronavirus: Contact Tracing

(asked on 24th April 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, when the Government will implement contact tracing to tackle the covid-19 outbreak.


Answered by
Nadine Dorries Portrait
Nadine Dorries
This question was answered on 7th May 2020

Contact tracing has been used throughout the COVID-19 response. At the start of the outbreak, when we were in the ‘contain’ phase, we traced the contacts of every case. When the country moved to the ‘delay’ phase, with widespread community transmission, the contact tracing approach changed to focus on specific places such as care homes.

We are now developing an integrated contact tracing and testing programme. This includes a new app which will complement existing web and phone-based contact tracing approaches. Alongside this there will be swab testing for those reporting COVID-19 symptoms. This programme will play an important role in helping to minimise the spread of the virus in the future. The app is currently undergoing testing.

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