Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many covid-19 tests performed at home were sent to testing centres on each day from 27 April 2020 to 5 May 2020.

Using data from Royal Mail the number of home tests conducted in this time frame are shown in the following table. It should be noted that the Royal Mail’s data captures when the kit is delivered at their delivery office near the laboratory. For example, if the kit is ‘scanned as delivered’ on 4 May, it will then make it to the laboratory the following morning, 5 May, at the agreed ‘drop-off’ time.

Tests returned are counted and reported only once they have been processed by the laboratory and will appear in the data for pillar 2.

Data on the number of tests processed by pillar is available at the following link:

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/testing

Information on the methodology of how testing data is compiled is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nhs-test-and-trace-statistics-england-methodology/nhs-test-and-trace-statistics-england-methodology