Leeds to double coronavirus testing this week to to check more NHS staff

There are around 57,000 NHS and care staff working in the city and 500 a day are being tested for the disease at a specially set up drive-thru testing site at Temple Green.

At the current rate it would take 114 days to test everyone that is eligible but, with the criteria for who can be tested expanding, the city is desperately trying to upscale the tests, which can take between 24 and 48 hours for results to be processed.

At a press conference this afternoon, called by Leeds City Council, Victoria Eaton, the director of public health in Leeds confirmed the city's current testing site at Temple Green will be upscaled and more locations for testing are being opened.

A site opened in Bradford yesterday with other sites in West Yorkshire also becoming available. Mobile testing units are also being deployed to care homes.

Ms Eaton said: "Clearly things are moving very quickly. We had announcements last night that the groups of people eligible for testing has expanded. We are making sure this works on the ground for us. As a city, we have achieved really good numbers of staff testing per day."

600 tests were carried out at Temple Green today (Wednesday) and that is set to be 1,000 a day within days, she added. Another challenge was dealing with the expanding groups that are eligible for tests and moving to regular testing in the future for staff, rather than one off tests.

She added: "We have enough capacity to test the people requesting tests. But the number is growing incredibly quickly. We will need to continue to grow the capacity as the number of people in the criteria grows. The challenge is significant. In the future we will need to look at not just one off testing but regular tests for staff in hospitals and care homes and other settings so we can keep staff, patients and residents safe".

Coun Rebecca Charlwood, executive member for health, wellbeing and adults said getting results processed was also an issue.

She said: "The scale of the challenge is very high. If we want to get people tested and lift the lockdown at some point - that is a big scaling up. We have enough materials available (for the tests) it is the lab capacity that we need to do the tests to get the results back."

The latest coronavirus statistics, released by the city council this evening, show a third of coronavirus related deaths have been in care homes.

It comes as politicians in the House of Commons earlier in the day expressed a "joint horror" at the number of deaths in the UK amid fears the country is on course to having the highest death toll in Europe.

In the city there were 1,273 Covid-19 cases reported by Leeds Teaching Hospital Trust (LTHT) as of 6pm on Monday. By last night it had been confirmed that there have been 358 covid-19 related deaths registered so far in Leeds since March 27, Of those 347 (97 per cent) were Leeds residents, 215 (60 per cent) were in hospitals, 114 (32 per cent) were in care homes, nine (three per cent) in a hospice, and 20 (six per cent) in their own home.

Leeds City Council added that to date, 33 per cent of all deaths registered have been identified as covid-19 related.