Liverpool's Population to be COVID-19 Tested

Liverpool became the first city in England to roll out mass testing of its 496,000 population for COVID-19 under the UK's Operation Moonshot program, reported The BMJ on November 3, 2020. All people living or working in Liverpool will be offered COVID-19 tests regardless of whether they have symptoms. 

Several types of covid tests will be used in the pilot, including existing polymerase chain reaction (PCR) swab tests, new lateral flow swab tests that can turn around results without the need to be processed in a laboratory, and new LAMP technology that will be deployed in Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust for NHS staff.

The pilot will test the feasibility of the government’s ambitious plans for mass population screening throughout England, as The BMJ first revealed in the leaked Operation Moonshot documents in September 2020. The UK Army will provide logistical support, with 2,000 personnel deployed.

Luke Allen, an academic clinical fellow at the University of Oxford, said in the BMJ article: “If it can be implemented smoothly then we will have a much clearer picture of how the virus is spreading. There are several big ‘ifs,’ though: people need to show up for testing, testing should happen repeatedly in order to track changes over time, and—most importantly—the track and trace system needs to function effectively.”