UK pursues South Korean-style exit strategy with push on contact tracing

Britain will pursue a South Korean style exit strategy as the UK’s testing star said 100,000 tests a day will be enough to conduct contact tracing. 

Professor John Newton said he was “very confident” the 100,000 figure would be enough to support whatever strategy the Government pursued and pointed to South Korea as an example of who seem to have successfully carried out contact tracing and testing. 

“If you look at other countries, for example South Korea, they’ve never done more than 20,000 tests a day, in fact they’re currently doing about 8,000 tests a day,” he told ITV’s Peston.

He added that the capacity of 100,000 a day was “probably just the beginning”. 

The former health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, added that testing in communities would have an overall impact of “grip on the disease”. 

Mr Hunt said that the “power of testing and contact tracing” was evident in other countries.

“Korea has never had more than nine deaths on any one day, it’s absolutely staggering, and Germany which is the closest in Europe on that front, has had a third of our deaths, despite having a larger population,” he said. 

He also said that in Korea  they have around “a thousand people working on contact tracing”.

“If someone calls and says they think they’ve got Coronavirus symptoms, you need to get round to them quickly.”