Covid-19 news: UK aims to recruit 25,000 contact tracers by June

UK prime minister Boris Johnson told MPs today that he is confident that the government will have recruited 25,000 coronavirus contact tracers by the start of June, which he says will provide the capacity to trace the contacts of 10,000 new coronavirus cases per day. Johnson said 24,000 contact tracers have already been recruited. In April, health secretary Matt Hancock said the government hoped to recruit 18,000 contact tracers by mid-May, to coincide with the planned release of the NHS covid-19 contact tracing app. But the widespread release of the app, currently being trialled on the Isle of Wight, has now been delayed until June. There are also ongoing concerns about privacy. In a recent report, security researchers wrote that there should be a legal requirement that all data collected by the app is deleted at the end of the coronavirus crisis, rather than being anonymised or repurposed.