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Okay, it's a special from the Anfield rap and I'm joined by Matt Ashton, he was the director of public health in Liverpool.

As you may well know by now, Liverpool is going to be the subject of mass COVID-19 testing from this weekend.

And we've got Matt on just to have a chat about it and to encourage people to get along because

Matt I think first and foremost we've got to say that this is a real opportunity for Liverpool,

isn't it?

This is a fantastic opportunity.

It's really exciting actually because we've got an opportunity

to shape our destiny here, shape our destiny out of this national lockdown,

shape how we emerge from that situation, shape what the levels of infections look like in the

city as we come out towards Christmas and into the new year.

So this is an amazing opportunity if we get this right.

Yeah and it's been horrible for everyone. It's changed it's changed everyone's lives and

it's really understandable if people are you know sick and tired of it really and a bit weary of the whole thing. But with this, I feel as though I see sort of people being suspicious about it, people floating, you know, different theories about it and all the rest of it.

I think it's important to say that the wants for this and the need for this has come from people in

Liverpool. It's not the other way around, it's not the government dictating towards is it it's people leaders in

Liverpool yourself included who said we want this in Liverpool absolutely this has

come from us it's come from us as a city it's come from myself it's come from the mayor it's come from the

leaders in the city and in the city region so the background to this is during

the summer we had an outbreak in Princess Park which some people might be aware of and cases shot up quite rapidly and we took a really proactive approach this by putting additional testing in right at the heart of our community and we got our community to get tested.

We used our community leaders, our community champions, to push people through those test insights.

And as a result of that, we controlled that outbreak

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