Published Thursday 11 June 2020 at 9:31
Our Director of Public Health and Wellbeing, Professor Dominic Harrison, has written another column for the Lancashire Telegraph: risks – choices will soon be ours.
Read it here:
Whose risk is it anyway?
None of us want any more avoidable deaths from Covid-19 than we have already had. Neither do any of us want to be locked down any more than we have to be. But until we get a vaccine for Covid-19, there are no easy choices.
We cannot both have zero risks and at the same time maximum freedoms to restart life again in full. We are all going to have to make trade-offs between safety and freedom.
Until now we have left many of the choices involved in this calculation to central government but that is likely to change soon. It begs the question “whose risk is Covid-19 anyway”?
New plans recently announced may change the ownership of the risk decisions – handing them from central government to local government and more importantly to all of us as individuals.
The plan for the Test Trace and Isolate (TTI) system at local authority level includes proposals for the local NHS, public health professionals and local councillors to establish an outbreak management control board.
Whilst this will still operate within a national policy framework, it will require local communities and public services to direct how future outbreaks at local level will be handled- based on local not national conditions.
Local boards will increasingly be able to direct testing, to prevent spread in high risk areas through education and prevention and to make decisions on whether to lockdown areas if serious outbreaks occur. The boards will be informed by local data and the best public health science. Critically, they should be accountable to the local community and their decisions made on the basis of local evidence made available in the public domain.
These boards will not be able to solve the problem alone. Central government, local government and communities are going to have to work differently together as the pandemic evolves.
We are going to have to have adult conversations about the risks and benefits of the decisions we make locally, and the trade-offs we might have to make between safety versus freedom.
From now on it will increasingly be ‘us’ and not ‘them’ who will be in charge of preventing further spikes in local Covid-19 infection.
But it will be individual choices to comply with advice on handwashing, social distancing, wearing face coverings in public space and self-isolating when required that will be the most important control mechanism to protect lives and livelihoods.
It’s our call – the risk is ours.
You can also find it on the Lancashire Telegraph website.