Eager Londoners queue up to be tested in race to find Covid variants

Officials astonished' at level of public engagement a year into the pandemic

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The steady stream of people at the two surge testing units in Finchley, north London, last week suggests that, more than a year after the pandemic hit, the public spirit to do something about Covid is still strong.

The effectiveness of surge testing is a more open question, however. The rapid testing of 5,000 households last week was an attempt to isolate the South African variant and others of concern. Yet although standard PCR tests come back within 24 hours, genomic sequencing tests to identify a Covid variant take 14 days - by which time the period of infectiousness is usually over.