50,000 walk-in coronavirus tests as community roll-out gets underway in Doncaster

Doncaster has been given the go-ahead for widescale community testing with work on the scheme to get under way in the next few days.

Dr Rupert Suckling, Director of Public Health for Doncaster, has welcomed the Government’s announcement that Doncaster has been approved for the programme.

He said: “Having our plans to offer wider community testing in the borough approved is good news.

"We need to focus on being able to reach communities that may need extra help to access testing so this project will go to them in their local areas.

"This is not mass testing like in Liverpool but more targeted.

"We aim to start in mid-January until the end of February initially and have walk-in local testing for 50,000 residents including those who care for people who are clinically extremely vulnerable due to underlying health conditions.

"We will be using local buildings and facilities that are well-known and will be local testing hubs. We will be announcing where in due course.”

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.

The Department of Health and Social Care said expanding the Community Testing Programme to more people without symptoms was "crucial given that around one in three people" who contract Covid-19 show no symptoms.

There have been 615 coronavirus deaths in Doncaster since the start of the pandemic, while more than 1,500 patients have been successfully treated and discharged by Doncaster and Bassetlaw NHS Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust which runs Doncaster Royal Infirmary, Mexborough’s Montagu Hospital and Bassetlaw Hospital in Worksop.

Last week, the Trust said it was treating more than 110 Covid patients in its hospitals, with twenty of them receiving intensive care treatment.

The latest weekly infection rate in Doncaster is 337.9 new cases per 100,000 – up from 236.6 the previous week.