CLOSE to 1,000 people per minute have been receiving their coronavirus tests, according to the head of test and trace.

Baroness Dido Harding, chair of NHS Test and Trace programme, has said close to 1,000 people per minute were being testedwhen speaking to the Commons Public Accounts Committee:

She said: “In terms of numbers, every minute yesterday 965 people were swabbed or swabbing themselves throughout the day.

“In the first two weeks of the new year, we’ve tested over 7.5 million people. In the last week of published data – so the first week of January – our contact tracers successfully reached a million people, both people who tested positive and their close contacts.

“That translates in 198 people a minute successfully contact-traced (during) every minute of the working day, seven days a week.”

The Tory peer said the work carried out by Test and Trace was lowering the R number by 0.3 and 0.6 and, in high Covid prevalence areas, between 0.5 and 0.8.

The results were also being analysed by Government to inform decisions needed to tackle the spread of the virus, she told MPs.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said four million people have received a vaccine so far and insisted it was the right step to begin immunising others on the priority list.

During a visit to Oxfordshire, the Prime Minister told reporters: “We’re getting it out as fast as we can, four million done so far, I think we’ve done more than half of the over-80s, half of the people in care homes, the elderly residents of care homes.

“Those groups remain our top priority, they’re an absolute priority for us, but it’s right as more vaccine comes on stream to get it into the arms of the other groups on the JCVI list.”