Matt Hancock has suggested up to 10,000 people a day could be contracting coronavirus, as he urged members of the public to download the long-delayed NHS tracing app that was finally launched today.
It comes after the UK officially recorded 6,178 infections of the virus on Wednesday – the highest daily increase since 1 May – and 37 more deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test.
Speaking to Sky News, the health secretary said: “The massive testing capability we’ve got helps to find where the virus is so, if you think about it, yesterday we had a figure that there is over 6,000 people who have tested positive in the previous 24 hours.
“And that is comparable to the highest levels in the peak in terms of the number of people who were tested positive but back then we estimate through surveys that over 100,000 people a day were catching the disease, but we only found around 6,000 of them and they tested positive.
