Residents in parts of Surrey will be offered coronavirus tests after two people who had not travelled to South Africa caught the country's Covid-19 variant.
Regardless of whether or not they have symptoms, households in the Goldsworth Park and St Johns areas of Woking will be visited by healthcare workers for Covid testing.
People in Egham may soon be visited also. The "surge testing" programme is designed to "closely monitor any community spread of the new variant, and restrict further transmission", Sky News reports.
When a surge testing scheme is carried out, as much of a population as possible is tested in a bid to trace and then contain an outbreak.