Good morning. George Eustice, the environment secretary, said this morning that more than 10,000 people working in the food supply industry will benefit from a scheme to use daily testing as an alternative to isolation. It means that if staff are pinged by the NHS Covid app, or told to isolate by test and trace, because they have been in contact with someone testing positive, they will be able to stay at work provided they test negative. Announcing the scheme last night, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said:
Daily contact testing [ie, testing for people who are contacts of people testing positive] will be rolled out to critical workplaces in the food supply chain so that contacts who would otherwise be self-isolating can instead take daily tests.
Priority testing sites have already been identified with industry for urgent implementation this week, including the largest supermarket distribution centres, with rollout to hundreds of sites planned to start next week, with up to 500 sites in scope.
The move will allow…
