Birmingham City Council hopes to use the army to provide extra capacity for its door-to-door coronavirus testing service service.
As the latest figures showed a rise in the number of coronavirus cases in the city over the past five days, the council's deputy leader Brigid Jones said 500 council staff had been redeployed to its "drop-and-collect" testing service.
Ms Jones told a meeting of the West Midlands Combined Authority on Friday (September 25) that the initiative involved going door to door in high-risk areas offering testing kits to those with or without symptoms.
She told the meeting: "We have been in talks with the military about them giving us some extra capacity for drop-and-collect. "It's very much in an extra capacity,