Boris Johnson pledges 500,000 coronavirus tests per day by end of October

Testing has been used primarily to identify people who are positive so they can be isolated from the community to protect high risk groups, Boris Johnson said at a Downing Street press conference on Wednesday (September 9).

However, he added the government wants to use new types of tests "in the near future" to identify people who do not have coronavirus and are not infectious so they can live life "in a more normal way".

To achieve this, he said the government was "working hard" to increase testing capacity to 500,000 tests a day by the end of October, and to create tests which are simple, quick and scalable.

He said: "They use swabs or saliva and can turn round results in 90 or even 20 minutes.

"Crucially, it should be possible to deploy these tests on a far bigger scale than any country has yet achieved - literally millions of tests processed every single day."

A pilot scheme will be rolled out in Salford next month, he added.