Published Thursday 20 August 2020 at 9:32
Our Director of Public Health and Wellbeing, Professor Dominic Harrison, has written another column for the Lancashire Telegraph.
Read it here:
We are all conditioned to think that risk and danger arrives from outside, from strangers, from those we do not know or do not see coming – but with coronavirus it is exactly the opposite.
Covid-19 infection is most likely to be an unwelcome gift from those you love most.
The majority of us who do get infected with Covid-19 are going to get it from someone we know very well and see regularly-someone who cares about us. Most of us who do become infected will get the virus from our immediate family, our relatives, a close friend or neighbour.
About half of all confirmed cases of coronavirus in Blackburn with Darwen are cases within the same household – forming a household cluster. Here someone, maybe a younger household member has become infected and may be asymptomatic. They will unknowingly pass it on to other household members and as an older member gets symptoms the whole family gets tested and find out they are all positive. A very large number of the remaining cases in the borough are clustered in very small areas, in a number of streets, statistically at a ‘lower super output area’- of about 1,500 people. Here it is clear that transmission must be occurring between family, friends and neighbours.
These ‘hotspots’ are telling us something very important about how the virus is spreading in the borough – that our pattern of spread is hyper-local and mostly related to social contacts with people we know.
So far, despite our best efforts, we still have amongst the highest rates of transmission in the country. We had our highest rate of cases per 100,000 of the population in the week ending August 12 We have had a Covid confirmed case rate of 94.7 per 100,000 of the population – which represents 141 cases per week. Our testing rates are still about double the national average at 210 per 100,000 and our positivity rate is at 6.5 per cent. This is also the highest it has been in recent weeks.
If we are going to avoid a full lockdown by central government we now need to be even more prescriptive on what can and can’t be done, to target the behaviours we know risk passing on the virus and to move to a stricter enforcement approach to breaches of the guidance.
The approach we take from now on is going to have to be even more targeted on hyper-local areas of highest transmission.
We are going to need everyone to stick to the guidance we have published and to remember to stick strictly to this – with no exceptions for family, friends and neighbours!
You can also read the article on the Lancashire Telegraph website.