THE Health Secretary Matt Hancock is to hold a coronavirus press briefing later today and is expected to announce further details on testing.

Mr Hancock is expected to announce further details on the Government's community testing programme during a Downing Street conference at 5pm.

The Prime Minister Boris Johnson previously promised that fast mass community testing systems would be rolled out across all three tiers.

The tests, which were trialled in Liverpool, provide results in around 20 minutes without the need laboratory analysis.

The PM signalled on Thursday that mass community testing was the way out of Tier 3 restrictions, saying it involved “everybody working together to kick Covid out”.

But the Faculty of Public Health and the Association of Directors of Public Health said in a joint statement this would be a massive undertaking that would stretch the country’s resources in the fight against Covid-19 such that other priorities may be compromised.

It said: “Firstly, substantial resources – human and financial – are needed to deliver lateral flow testing at scale.

“The additional logistical capacity provided to Liverpool to set up and manage testing sites alone has been enormous, and it is difficult to envisage how or even whether this could be replicated at the pace being proposed across the country.

There is an enormous price tag attached to this programme, and the resources and capacity needed come at a time of overwhelming and competing priorities

“This threatens to be a distraction from other activities, like planning and rolling out vaccines."