Travellers arriving in the UK took around 500,000 tests in the three weeks beginning 1 July said chair of the transport select committee, Huw Merriman MP, citing data from NHS Test and Trace.
However, while nearly 7,000 of these tests were positive, only 354 were genomically sequenced – around 5%.
Merriman said passengers spend around £35 million on PCR tests during that specific three-week period, meaning each sequenced test cost £100,000.
The government is continuing to insist, as recently as its Wednesday traffic light update (4 August), that sequencing was vital to guarding new Covid-19 variants arriving in the UK.
