Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many COVID-19 tests were carried out on each day since 28 April; how many of those were retests each day; what were the reasons for retests being necessary; what assessment they have made of the impact of carrying out a retest before knowing the result of the original test on the reduction of COVID-19 cases; and what is their percentage target for the maximum number of retests from each set of daily tests.

The number of daily tests and number of people tested from 28 April to 7 May 2020 are shown in the following table.

Data on the number of re-tests are not recorded. Re-testing is undertaken according to the judgement of clinicians, based on the case by case circumstances and need presented to them. They may run tests more than once on an individual, if they feel it is appropriate. Therefore, targets have not been set for re-testing.