UK health secretary Sajid Javid has admitted the government will “need to constrain” the supply of rapid Covid-19 tests over the next fortnight to respond to “unprecedented demand” driven by the Omicron variant surge.
“The arrival of the Omicron variant has caused record case numbers and unprecedented demand for both PCR and Lateral Flow Device [LFD] tests,” Javid wrote in a letter to MPs on Wednesday evening. “This has inevitably placed strain on the testing system, despite the impressive scaling-up of supply, logistics and laboratory capacity.
“We expect to need to constrain the system at certain points over the next two weeks to manage supply over the course of each day, with new tranches of supply released regularly throughout each day.”