Tesco is offering lateral flow tests to customers at a price cheaper than a coffee as free Covid testing in England is scrapped.
Under new government guidance, millions are no longer able to order free Covid testing equipment to find out if they have the virus.
Tesco is now offering people the chance to buy a lateral flow test for just £2, cheaper than a takeaway coffee, reports Birmingham Live.
Healthcare firm Everything Genetic are helping supply the tests to Tesco, and the firm's chief executive James Price hopes the scheme can help consumers who are worried about expenses during the cost of living crisis.
The healthcare firm aims to maintain test prices to less than a "takeaway coffee” to provide "reliable, accurate and affordable" tests, Mr Price said.
He added: "As the kits will now be positioned in convenient Tesco retail locations up and down the country, they’ll be readily available at a moment’s notice for anyone wanting to get tested".
It comes as Covid infection levels hit a record high across the UK. Some 4.9 million people in the UK are estimated to have had Covid-19 in the week ending March 2, up from 4.3 million in the previous week, the Office for National Statistics said.
The ONS data shows one in 13 people in England are estimated to have had Covid during that week, up from one in 16 the week before, and in Wales the figure is one in 14 people, up from one in 16.
Both are record highs and it comes after experts warned that at such levels anyone in the population who can catch Covid is likely to get it.
Boots and Superdrug are also selling individual tests or packs of five to those who want them, while some groups do still have access to free asymptomatic testing. These include patient facing NHS staff, adult social care and hospice staff.
A small number of care home visitors who provide personal care, some prison workers and workers in high risk domestic abuse refuges also have access to the free testing.
Earlier this week, the Government's chief scientific adviser for England, Sir Patrick Vallance, warned the "world needs to be ready" for inevitable future pandemics which look very different to the current one.
"It's very obvious to everyone in this meeting that there will be a future pandemic," he said. "That I think is clear. It's also clear this one is not over and we've got very high infection rates at the moment.
"And the room for this virus to evolve remains very large, so we could be taken by surprise again with a variant that escapes immunity."
