Published Thursday 5 November 2020 at 10:17
Our Director of Public Health and Wellbeing, Professor Dominic Harrison, has written another column for the Lancashire Telegraph.
Read it here:
The decision of the government to call for a national lockdown in England has been both late and unpopular.
However – as France, Germany and Belgium have concluded in the last two weeks – it is both necessary and inevitable.
Last week the government published an interim report on the ‘real rate’ of Covid-19 in England. This is different to the confirmed case rates we see every day which depends on people voluntarily going to be tested. Led by Imperial College London and Ipsos MORI, the REACT research tests a representative sample of about 85,000 people.
The results for the tests taken between October 16 and 25 show that the prevalence of Covid-19 infection has more than doubled since the last round of testing, with 1.28 per cent now infected in England. This means an estimated 1,280 people per 100,000 of England’s population on average have the virus that causes Covid-19, compared to 600 as of October 5. As expected, the North West, at 2.3 per cent, has one of the highest regional rates with clusters of cases in Lancashire, Manchester, Liverpool and West Yorkshire.
The rate of confirmed cases for Blackburn with Darwen for the week ending October 28 was at 742 per 100,000 of the population- the highest rate in England in that week. Within the Borough, the rate for 17 to 21-year-olds was at 994 per 100,000 but the rate for those aged 60 plus was up 20 per cent in that week alone and was at 561 per 100,000.
The rate of confirmed cases per 100,000 in those aged 60 and above is the key driver of how much pressure the NHS and social care system will be under over the second wave this autumn and winter.
With Pennine Lancashire having amongst the highest rates of cases in the UK, East Lancashire Hospitals Trust is under particular pressure. .
It is proposed that the four week lockdown for England will end on the December 2 and at the moment we expect that local authority areas will then revert to the tiered system of Covid-19 controls. It is possible (but not yet confirmed) that areas who exit the lockdown with a rates of more than 250 per 100,000 may be likely to go back to Tier three, those with 150 or less to Tier two.
For Pennine Lancashire as a whole this means that to get to Tier 2two on December 2, we would need to drive down the confirmed case rates by about 50 per cent over the next four weeks.
Yet, despite strong control measures since mid-August in much of Pennine Lancashire, we have still had rapidly rising rates, so this is going to be a big challenge
The next four weeks of lockdown are going to put us all under a great deal of pressure, psychologically, emotionally and practically; but the government, the council, the police or the NHS cannot make the lockdown a success for us.
Most of the things that will make a difference now are the decisions we are all going to make over the next four weeks to either stick by the rules or to bend or to break them.
We all need to do the right thing – it’s now down to us.