Manchester Evening News has spoken to public health directors here and elsewhere in the north of England, to senior council and NHS officials and to local politicians, to find out what the moonshot will really look like if and when it lands.
And the view from the ground is not quite as simple as the government’s messaging implies. Northern areas including Greater Manchester have already been working for some time on plans to use the new ‘lateral flow’ tests involved in the Liverpool trial, including talking to Liverpool about how that pilot has been going and what lessons the city has been learning.
Both here and elsewhere, public health departments, scientists and local authority chief executives have spent weeks thinking through where.
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