Leicestershire County Council is poised to roll out surge testing if a Covid variant of concern is detected in the county.

Surge testing is a method where large parts of a population, who may not have symptoms, are tested en masse and sometimes door to door, in a bid to get a full picture of the spread of a new strain of the virus.

Leicestershire's director of public health, Mike Sandys, says a plan is already in place if door to door testing is needed.

He said that an increasing number of test results are now being genome sequenced, meaning the more people taking the rapid tests, the better picture there is of the current situation.

Take-up for the lateral flow tests, being offered to asymptomatic people at community sites across the county, has been good, with more than 33,200 swabs processed.

Another nearly 3,000 rapid testing kit boxes – which contain several tests – have also been given out, allowing people to test at home, many to parents or those in contact with school age children.

Mike has renewed appeals for people to make testing part of everyday routines, especially as lockdown restrictions ease.

He said: "If we can build regular testing into everyday life it allows us to keep a close eye on what is happening and react as soon as we need to.

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"Asymptomatic testing gives us a good picture of what's happening in an area. There has been criticism of the fact that a positive result then needs a follow-up PCR test but it's the testing that allows us to keep a close eye on what is happening locally."

He added: "The other thing that testing allows us to do is keep an eye on variants, with more results being sent off, we get more information about the virus."

Current data suggests that no variants of concern have been detected locally, but the county council is ready to act, should that change.

"We have plans in place should we need to roll out surge testing similar to that in South London," he added.

"We've been here a few times now with different variants, there was the Chile, South African, Brazillian, and the general feeling seems to be that the vaccine's efficacy might be affected but there will still be some level of protection.

"It's really important that we keep on top of variants and testing is the way we can do that."