How did Matt Hancock hit his 100,000 test target?

Matt Hancock has announced that the government has managed to meet its 100,000 coronavirus tests a day target. The Health Secretary confirmed at a Downing Street press conference that on 30 April, Public Health England carried out 122,347 tests – suggesting the government not only reached its target in time, but also over-delivered. But look at the small print and there were barely 73,191 people tested yesterday. There is another mysterious second category, now introduced, that takes the figure over 100,000.

Here’s the graph:

So what’s the trick? The Health Service Journal reports that to reach the testing target, the government has begun to count home-testing kits which have been posted to patients, rather than completed and processed in a lab – with tens of thousands urgently dispatched yesterday. Which means that if someone signed up to receive a test on 30 April, this would count towards the governments’ figures – even if it took days or weeks for the actual test to arrive.