LONDON, Sept 24 (Reuters) - The British government estimates
less than 10,000 people a day are contracting COVID-19, health
minister Matt Hancock said on Thursday, less than during the
pandemic's peak, even as numbers testing positive have risen to
similar levels.
"(At the peak), we estimate through surveys that over
100,000 people a day were catching disease, but we only found
around 6,000 of them, and they tested positive. Now we estimate
that it's under 10,000 people a day getting the disease. That's
too high, but it's still much lower than in the peak," he told
Sky News on Thursday.
Britain reported 6,178 new daily cases of COVID-19 on
Wednesday.
Hancock also said the proportion of people getting a
so-called false positive test result is below 1%.
(Reporting by Kate Holton and Sarah Young, writing by James
Davey, editing by Alistair Smout)