Published Thursday 30 April 2020 at 9:25
Our Director of Public Health and Wellbeing, Professor Dominic Harrison, has written another column for the Lancashire Telegraph: ‘Coronavirus testing will be ‘part of life”.
Read it here:
On the 20th March, in response to the Covid-19 crisis, the government announced the closure of pubs, restaurants and leisure centres.
Schools were closed except for the children of key workers, vulnerable children and those on education, health and care plans.
By March 23 we all went into full lockdown and this has now been rolled over until May 7.
This lockdown has saved many lives and the government has now announced it will soon publish plans for exit and recovery.
This will involve slowly lifting the lockdown restrictions in phases to allow more social and economic life across the country to restart.
Key conditions include that we ensure the number of new Covid-19 cases are contained and that the NHS is not overwhelmed.
To do this, we need a new case finding and contact tracing system to identify, track, treat and isolate any new and emerging cases of the virus.
This will involve an NHS App which will allow anyone to alert their close contacts if they have been infected and ask those contacts to self-isolate and seek a coronavirus test.
It will also require a new ‘army’ of 18,000 contact tracers.
Local government will be asked to help people who, if they do get infected, may need extra support for instance to get tested and maintain self-isolation if Covid-19 positive.
We may also soon have four key sources of data by which we can identify where micro-outbreaks are occurring down to postcode level (average about 20 houses).
We will have the Covid-19 symptomatic data from NHS 111, data from all those now being tested, hospital admissions data and data from death certificates in which Covid-19 is identified.
Aligning all four data sources by postcode will help us to identify any local ‘hotspots’.
In these areas we might want to pro-actively case find by calling on every house in that postcode and invite household members to take a coronavirus test and self-isolate if confirmed positive. This all has still to be agreed as part of the national plan.
Each of these measures will be needed if we are to drive down the numbers of new people being infected once the lockdown is gradually lifted.
Councils have a lot of experience in this field – we have been managing infectious disease outbreaks in and with our local communities for over 150 years.
Your local council will need your help and support in this work as it evolves – the better we all get at it the sooner life will open up again for all of us.
It is something that will become part of all our lives for the foreseeable future.
You can also find it on the Lancashire Telegraph website.