Regular rapid testing for people without coronavirus symptoms will be made available across England this week, the government has said.
The community testing regime — expanded to cover all 317 local authorities — uses rapid lateral flow tests, which can return results in 30 minutes, according to BBC.
Local councils are being encouraged to prioritize tests for those who cannot work from home during the lockdown.
Meanwhile, thousands of people over 80 are being invited to book vaccinations.
England National Health Service (NHS) said 130,000 letters with invitations for vaccinations at one of seven new regional centers began arriving on doormats this weekend, with more than 500,000 following this week.
On Saturday the number of people who have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive COVID test reached 80,000.
Scientists advising the government have warned that lockdown measures in England need to be stricter to achieve the same impact as the March shutdown.
England’s chief medical Professor Chris Whitty said that, unless people started to follow the rules more strictly, emergency patients will have to be turned away from hospitals, causing “avoidable deaths”.
Writing in the Sunday Times, Whitty said: “Every unnecessary interaction you have could be the link in a chain of transmission which has a vulnerable person at the end.”
Meanwhile, the chair of the British Medical Association, Chaand Nagpaul, revealed that more than 46,000 hospital staff are off sick with COVID-19, which is adding to the pressure on the NHS and beginning to affect the vaccination program, the Observer reported.
Under the national lockdown, people in England must stay at home and can go out only for limited reasons such as food shopping, exercise, or work if they cannot do so from home. Similar measures are in place across much of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The Department of Health and Social Care said expanding the Community Testing Program to more people without symptoms was “crucial given that around one in three people” who contract COVID-19 show no symptoms.
It said regular community testing using the rapid tests had already identified more than 14,800 positive COVID-19 cases.
So far, 131 local authorities in England have enrolled in the government’s community testing program, with Milton Keynes, Slough, Doncaster and Essex the latest to join.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said targeted asymptomatic testing and subsequent isolation was “highly effective in breaking chains of transmission”.
“Lateral flow tests have already been hugely successful in finding positive cases quickly — and every positive case found is helping to stop the spread — so I encourage employers and workers to take this offer up,” he said.
NHS Test and Trace will also work closely with other government departments to scale-up workforce testing, the Department of Health and Social Care said.
Many are already piloting regular workforce testing, with 15 large employers having taken up this offer already across 64 sites, “including organizations operating in the food, manufacturing, energy and retail sectors, and within the public sector including job centers, transport networks and the military”.
An estimated 27,000 tests have taken place across the public sector as part of pilots so far, the department added.
The Department of Health and Social Care said plans were already in place for rapid testing of staff and students in schools and colleges and staff in primary schools.
It said primary schools would start to get home testing kits for staff shortly to test people on a weekly basis, while “secondary schools and colleges have set up test sites, and have started testing staff and students present on site during the lockdown”.