On 2 April, the UK government pledged to deliver 100,000 tests per day by the end of the month. "That is the goal and I am determined that we will get there," said the UK health secretary Matt Hancock, speaking at the daily coronavirus press conference.

The British government has been heavily criticized for not rolling out widespread testing much earlier, and has now been struggling to keep up with its ambitious testing target. In the 24 hours up to 9:00 on 28 April, only 43,563 tests were carried out, less than the current capacity would allow – up to 75,000 according to the UK government.

To meet its goal of 100,000 tests per day, the UK set up three new mega-laboratories, one in Milton Keynes, one in Alderley Park, in Cheshire, and one in Glasgow. To this day, the government is still confident that it will meet its testing goal.

Pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and GSK, working together with Cambridge University, are almost ready to start operating testing in their lab in Cambridge.

"We have 154 people working on site, from 6am – to 12pm every day, in shifts with volunteers from university and our staff," explains Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca. "We've gone through the accreditation process with the NHS [National Health Service] and we are absolutely on track to deliver 30,000 tests per day by the second week of May."

AstraZeneca says its lab tests can develop the results 4 times faster than other tests. The company has also been working on an antibody test with Oxford University, able to identify whether someone has already been infected with the virus. The test has been validated and is 99 percent accurate.

"We have an antibody test that works," says Soriot. "We've started testing our own employees, and it's working very well. We diagnosed two employees that were affected and thank god we did that before we went into our manufacturing test."

At the beginning of the outbreak in the UK only the sickest patients in hospitals were tested. But testing has since then been extended to include all NHS workers and key workers, and from this week, all care home residents and staff, people aged over 65, and people who have to leave the house for work and their households.

The UK government also announced that by the end of this week 25,000 home testing kits will be available for ordering every day – but these will need to be processed in a lab.

At Oxford University a group of experts is working on a research project in cooperation between China and the UK for a home testing kit that can provide results within 30 minutes. One of the study's lead scientists, Professor Zhangfeng Cui, says testing is the only way to get out of lockdown.

"Why stay home? Because we don't know who is infectious? No country is prepared for this. It's basically an experiment. I'm a scientist, sometimes the experiment succeeds. Sometimes not."

Mass testing in countries like Germany and South Korea has been proven essential to fight the spread of COVID-19, and experts refer to it as the only way we have to understand the pandemic and inform the government’s decisions on containment measures.