The U.K. government has reached its target of 100,000 coronavirus tests realized in a day, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock said Friday.
“I knew that it was an audacious goal,” he said during the daily pandemic briefing organized by the government. “I can announce that we have met our goal.”
Officials quoted by the Times of London added that the government might now be able to test up to 200,000 persons a day by mid-May.
Hancock said that 122,347 tests had been carried out in the 24-hour period ending at 9 a.m. Friday, up 50% over the day before.
But the government was accused of creative accounting, as it is including in its count home-testing kits sent by mail, even if the individual receiving them hadn’t actually performed the test and returned the sample.
The home-testing kits are delivered by Amazon AMZN,
Hancock promised a month ago that the U.K. was aiming to realize 100,000 tests a day, a pledge that was seen as ambitious at the time, particularly in that, since the beginning of the outbreak, the U.K. has had the lowest testing ratio in Europe (just behind France), measured as the number of individuals tested compared with the general population.
