UK's Johnson in June pledge for rollout of contact-tracing

LONDON (AP) — The British government pledged Wednesday to bring lawmakers back to the green benches of Parliament and have a “test, track and trace” program for the coronavirus in place by June 1, hoping to persuade the country that it’s time to cautiously start to emerge from the COVID-19 lockdown.

It hopes the commitment can also pave the way for the reopening of schools for some younger children.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson made the contact-tracing pledge after more criticism of his government's failure to have a national system in place for the past 10 weeks. Being able to track the contacts of those who have contracted the virus is considered a central plank of the government's plan to ease further lockdown restrictions.

“We’re making fast progress in testing and tracing and I have great confidence that by June 1 we will have a system that will enable us, that will help us very greatly to defeat this disease and move the country forward,” Johnson said.

Johnson said there will be 25,000 trackers in place who will be able to trace the contacts of 10,000 new cases a day, which is significantly more than the current level of 2,400 daily infections. He made no mention of whether a tracing app being trialed in the Isle of Wight, off the southern England coast, will be ready by then.

Johnson was responding to more criticism of the government from Keir Starmer, the leader of the main opposition Labour Party. He lambasted the government for having “no effective tracing in place” since March 12 when he said widespread tracing was effectively “abandoned.” Starmer said this has been a “huge hole” in the country’s defense against the coronavirus.

In an attempt to normalize the return to work now that the rate of infection is falling, the government also said it was looking to get lawmakers back...