Soldiers have been deployed to six towns in the north of England to carry out mass Covid-19 testing in a bid to hold off a second lockdown.
The initiative is a part of Boris Johnson's Operation Moonshot to test up to a million people a day.
Whether people have coronavirus symptoms or not they will be offered the test and will receive their results in half an hour.
A target was set for 500,000 tests a day and it's believed ministers will have reached that figure by tomorrow.
Redcar is one of the first areas for the pilot scheme to take place but residents have been assured the army “wouldn’t be knocking on people’s doors”, reports The Times.
Jacob Young the local Conversative MP said: “This is a voluntary scheme that will better identify who has Covid-19 in our community, help them to self-isolate, and therefore reduce the spread. Mass testing is the quickest way we will see restrictions reduced and so I think it is a good thing for Redcar.”
It's reported that there are several saliva based tests which have been passed by government standards.
However, experts warned yesterday that they were likely to fall short of the sensitivity of the standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests as they are not as "sensitive".
Professor of molecular oncology at Warwick Medical School, Lawrence Young, said: “The biggest issue is the sensitivity.
“For people in the acute phase of infection, who are symptomatic, they seem to be adequate. But there’s a big question mark over whether these tests would actually detect asymptomatic infection. And we all believe that that’s a major source of the spread.”
Although testing data suggests that the saliva tests can pick up 96 per cent of positive results.
