So I suppose that constitutes regularly doing 500,000 tests a day under the new regime. To get to the mythical figure for that one day they had to include almost 50,000 lateral flow device tests which are some of the most accurate tests available for coronavirus in fact so accurate that a coin toss would be better.
Shared results on the mass testing programmes at the University of Birmingham and Scottish universities suggesting that the lateral flow tests had a sensitivity of just 3% (the proportion of people with covid-19 who tested positive) and that 58% of the positives were false positives. Previous data from the Liverpool mass testing pilot programme found that lateral flow tests detected just 48.89% of covid-19 infections in asymptomatic people when compared with a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. It also found that the Innova Lateral Flow SARS-CoV-2 antigen test failed to detect three in 10 cases with the highest viral loads.
The UK has spent more than £600million on these tests which are likely going to be used to allow people to travel in and out of the country spreading the virus as they go.