Coronavirus has changed everything. Make sense of it all with the Waugh Zone, our evening politics briefing. Sign up now.
A new Covid-19 testing facility being developed at Heathrow Airport could cut the mandatory quarantine period for people returning from abroad, Matt Hancock has said.
Arriving passengers will be able to book swab tests and have results sent to them in seven hours under the proposal, which is being used in Germany and Iceland.
Travellers can do a second test at home a few days later and then leave quarantine early if they pass both checks, according to reports.
The health secretary said ministers are working with the London airport to find a way for the testing to reduce the quarantine period.
Heathrow executives hope those testing negative could leave quarantine five to eight days after landing, though the airport’s programme needs government approval before it can begin.
Hancock told Sky News: “We’re working with Heathrow and with other airports on this project.
“The challenge is because the virus can incubate inside your body without coming forward and without therefore a test being positive even if you’ve got it. The challenge is how to do that testing in a way that we can have confidence enough in to release the quarantine.
“But absolutely it’s a project we’re working with Heathrow on because clearly I understand the impact of quarantine in so many people’s lives. It’s not something anybody would want to do so I hope this project can bear fruit.”
It came as health officials also announced plans to ramp up the coronavirus infection survey across Britain. The Office for National Statistics research aims to increase to include 400,000 people – up from the current 28,000.
Meanwhile, data from official agencies across Britain shows that more than 57,000 deaths involving Covid-19 have been registered in the UK.
Hancock has said ministers are “working as fast as we can” to achieve the “moonshot” of population-wide coronavirus testing to ease restrictions.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “This is a really, really important drive that we have across government to bring in mass testing, population-wide testing.
“The new technologies for testing that are coming on stream now are incredibly important. At the moment you have to send off a test to a laboratory and get it back, and all the logistics of that takes time; it’s also quite expensive.
“We’re testing some of these right now in Porton Down, in our scientific labs, and the mass testing, population testing, where we make it the norm that people get tested regularly allowing us therefore to allow some of the freedoms back, is a huge project in government right now with enormous support.”
When pressed, Hancock declined to say when mass testing would be available.
“We’re ramping it up over the remainder of this year. I’m not going to put a firm deadline on it. The answer is we’re working as fast as we can,” he said.
“This moonshot to have testing ubiquitous and available to reopen all sorts of things to reduce the burden of the quarantine arrangements, which nobody wants to have in place, to allow us to reopen parts of the economy, that is an incredibly important project within government right now.”