Technology for "Operation Moonshot" does not yet exist, say experts

Health officials raise concerns about the Prime Minister's plan to mass test for COVID-19.

Boris Johnson said that he hoped for 10 million tests by spring of 2021, some of which would give results in just a matter of minutes, processed daily.

He said: "We believe that new types of test which are simple, quick and scalable will become available. They use swabs or saliva and can turn round results in 90 or even 20 minutes."

But scientists say that the technology to facilitate this estimated £100 bn plan "does not, as yet, exist".

During his speech yesterday, which announced that people in England could only have a gathering of up to six people from Monday, the PM said that downing street was working towards increasing testing to 500,000 tests daily by the end of October.

Right now, around 150,000 to 200,000 tests are being processed every day, and the capacity of tests is reportedly 350,000 a day.

But earlier this week Sarah-Jane Marsh, the director of the test and trace programme for England, tweeted an apology for issues surrounding the current system, explaining that labs were at a "critical pinch-point".

Dr David Strain, from the University of Exeter, said: "The prime minister's suggestion that this will be as simple as 'getting a pregnancy test' that will give results within 15 minutes is unlikely, if not impossible, in the timescale he was suggesting to get the country back on track."

Cambridge professor and statistician, Sir David Spiegelhalter, warned of the possibility of false positives that the test could issue, explaining that "no tests are perfect".

He added: "That means that such a test will always generate a very large number of false positives. And if you only have 1% false positives among all the people who are not infectious, and you're testing the whole country, that's 600,000 people unnecessarily labelled as positives."