Less than 10,000 getting COVID-19 each day - UK health minister

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%.