Testing every Sheffield resident for Covid-19 is too hard, says Sheffield's health chief

The army has been drafted in to help with mass testing in Liverpool as a pilot project following a high number of cases there.

But Greg Fell, Sheffield's Director of Public Health, says there are scientific and logistical drawbacks.

He told a meeting of full council held on Wednesday: "I'm still not a fan of mass testing the whole population.

"Testing works if it's linked to the right interventions and we will learn from Liverpool if there is scientific validity.

"People would need to be tested and re-tested as doing it once is pointless so it will probably need to be done weekly or possibly fortnightly for a population of 600,000 in Liverpool.

"There are 2,000 troops in Liverpool but they won't be there forever. Liverpool can't pick up that logistical exercise and nor could Sheffield.

"We can't take on such a large scale exercise and the logistics is more of the deal breaker than the science."

Mr Fell said he did support testing in care homes and possibly for schools or the public sector to keep services running.

"I am a fan of using new technologies in a very defined way to address some of the real problems and there's probably more we can do in schools, care homes and workplaces although to be far, most big settings have done an awful lot already.

"Minimising the test delay had the largest impact on reducing transmissions, we need to make testing as accessible as possible.

"There needs to be a consistent push on getting tested, even with mild symptoms, people need to understand why and really believe it.

"We need to optimise test and trace coverage, particularly in communities we know there is an outbreak.

"We also need to optimise isolation. We know 80 per cent of people required to self isolate don't but changing this behaviour is essential to reducing transmissions.

"These things have the potential to prevent up to 80 per cent of transmissions.

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