Amazon is testing its front-line staff in Britain for coronavirus variants and feeding the data to public health officials, including in hotspots where a strain first found in India is spreading fast.

Luke Meredith, director of the Amazon Diagnostic Laboratory in Britain, said the company was open to offering the same service in the United States, and did not rule out making its testing programme available to the British public in future.

"It's very important that we acknowledge the fact that variants can transmit in different ways, they have different responses to vaccines, they may have different impacts on people's health," he told Reuters. "This is a learning phase."

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