Staffordshire County Council has requested assistance from the Army in the battle against coronavirus, it has been revealed.

The authority is looking ahead to how a mass vaccination programme could be delivered in the county in the coming months. And Staffordshire is one of 66 areas chosen to roll out of rapid turnaround lateral tests, which can give results in under an hour without the need for laboratory processing, it was announced last week.

But at Tuesday's Corporate Review Committee members heard the council was facing challenges in delivering the tests to residents.

Council leader Alan White said: "We thought lateral flow testing would be coming in this week but it's not going to be this week now because of various logistical issues."

Dr Richard Harling, the council's director of health and care, said: "These are new near patient tests which provide an opportunity to identify cases and their contacts more quickly. If we can get it rolled out at scale it is likely to have some impact on the spread of infection, although we do need to manage expectations as the virus is not going to disappear suddenly overnight because of an introduction of these tests.

"We expect to have them available at scale – the Government has indicated a supply of up to 10% of the population a week. The main constraint is they require a trained operator and there is no associated funding for people to deploy the tests.

"We are going to have to think imaginatively about how we get a workforce to be able to provide the tests. We have had a conversation with the district and borough councils.

"We envisage using these tests in a range of settings; for example making them available to public sector partners – in which we would need their own occupational health departments to provide the trained operators; making them available to large employers – again we would look to them to provide the workforce; and then to look to deploy them in those communities that have the highest rates of infection. In that scenario I think we would need to deploy volunteers and we have initiated conversations with the district and borough councils about how we mobilise a volunteer workforce to provide that capacity."

Councillor Ian Parry asked what the authority's role would be in delivering Covid-19 vaccinations when they were available. He said: "I'm wondering whether there has been any thought at the county on trying to now, as soon as possible, build some capacity however it can be done; whether training volunteers (or) bringing in the Army as they have done in the testing regime or some other means.

"Clearly this is going to fall flat if we don't have the capacity to deliver."

Councillor White said: "We have submitted a number of requests for military assistance. We have 11 Signals Brigade based in Stafford and the Defence Medical Services based in Whittington.

"Those requests have not come back with a positive response. We have also flagged up to the Covid-19 representative from the Cabinet Office who is also a military officer to say we have been making these requests and could you do what you can to help.

"Whilst those requests have been made they have so far fallen on deaf ears but we will continue to make them and hopefully we will get some support."

Dr Harling said the NHS would be taking the lead on administering vaccinations.

He added: "Each NHS area has been asked to begin planning and preparations to deploy the vaccine if and when it becomes available. They are likely to look to use mainly existing NHS resources, so I think primary care will play a significant role in this.

"We have been involved in those discussions and we are reasonably confident that the logistics are coming into place – there is still work to do. I think the main constraint will be the speed at which supplies of the vaccination can come through the pipeline."

He added that expectations would have to be managed in relation to potential Covid-19 vaccines. "It is really important to remind people in the meantime that they need to continue to follow the rules", he said.

"The number of Covid cases across the county continues to increase slowly – that is mirroring a slow rise across the country, although our case rate is significantly about the national and West Midlands averages. That is probably what we would expect given where we are in the current national lockdown.

"We hope that cases will start to come down in the next couple of weeks but it's difficult to say where we are going to be, either nationally or in the county by 2nd December.

"The NHS is coming under significant pressure nationally and in Staffordshire. That is a combination of increasing demand due to rising numbers of hospitalisations and also staff absence because staff are either sick or they're required to isolate as Covid contacts.

There is increasing concern about the impact of the second wave on the public sector. Reviewing our absence levels across the county council they are up because of Covid absence but not in a way yet that is threatening business continuity – albeit that remains a risk.

"Schools are starting to signal a degree of stress as a combination of staff absence and also the pressure of managing the pandemic, which they have been at for quite a number of months.

"The Government has indicated it is giving some thought as to what happens post-second lockdown and the indications are that the former alert levels will return, although possibly in a revised form. We hope to have a meaningful conversation with Government about which alert level we are in and what sort of restrictions would apply in Staffordshire to make sure we're balancing the impact of the virus against the impact of restrictions on mental health and wellbeing and the economy."