The military will be travelling around Powys this week with a mobile testing unit for coronavirus, health chiefs have confirmed.

The mobile testing unit forms part of the UK-wide response to coronavirus and will bring testing closer to home.

It will launch this week as an appointment service for priority groups identified in the Welsh Government testing strategy.

Stuart Bourne, director of public health for Powys Teaching Health Board, said: “In Powys we are already working with Public Health Wales and Welsh Government to provide testing facilities available for key workers, hospital-based testing for inpatients with symptoms, and testing in care homes for staff and residents.

“Whilst mass testing centres have been put in place in urban areas such as Cardiff and Newport, mobile units offer a solution for our rural geography here in Powys.

"This approach has been developed through a partnership with the Armed Forces and the Dyfed-Powys Local Resilience Forum.”

Mobile testing units can be set up in under 20 minutes. Specially trained Armed Forces personnel will collect swabs at the mobile sites, before they are sent to laboratories for processing. The aim is for all test results to be reported within 48 hours.

This move comes after it was reported this afternoon (Tuesday) that over 1,000 people have now died from coronavirus in Wales.

26 more deaths have been recorded in Wales over the past 24 hours, taking the total to 1,023, however this figure does not include all deaths recorded in the community.

There have been 45 deaths in the Hywel Dda (Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire) area, 150 in the Betsi Cadwaladr area (North Wales) and nine in Powys.

Dr Giri Shankar, incident director for the Covid-19 outbreak response at Public Health Wales, confirmed this afternoon: “Public Health Wales is working with the military to deploy a number of mobile testing units.

"Three of these units were available last week, and a further five will become available this week. Once these units are deployed, their ongoing management is being handed over to the relevant health boards.”

455 tests have so far been carried out in Ceredigion, with 37 confirmed cases of Covid-19.

Pembrokeshire has conducted 1,086 tests, with 230 positive cases of coronavirus, whilst Carmarthenshire has tested 2,194 people, with 503 confirmed cases.

Powys has tested 726 people, with 194 confirmed cases, and Gwynedd has tested 886 people and has 252 confirmed cases.