As Health chiefs meet this morning to decide whether new local lockdowns should be imposed on areas with growing coronavirus cases including Oldham, Oxford University Professor Carl Heneghan says that The government has got this wrong by focusing on the number of cases,”
If I look at the number of people in hospital right now, there are about 1,250 people across the Pennine trust; only nine of them have COVID-19 in a bed today … the virus at the moment is circulating at a low level. Oldham should be allowed to let their test and trace system function and get to work.”
“The politicians have got to stand back and reflect,” Heneghan went on. “Let’s see what happens in Oldham in the next two weeks … if we keep jumping in with this whack-a-mole strategy, which I don’t understand, we’re not going to learn that the test and trace and the public health people on the ground can manage this and that the people of Oldham can be deemed to be responsible and go about their business.”
Professor Heneghan’s intervention came after the leader of Oldham Council Sean Fielding told people that there has been a fall in case numbers in the Borough over the last week and he believes that the measures will continue to show a decrease.
In Oldham the pandemic is being spread in households, it has not been brought into those households from people going to the pub or going for meals but from people who were working in businesses that never closed down in the first wave.
He believes that a local lockdown would not be practical and would be disastrous in what is a fragile economy.
Compared to Leicester, Leicester is in a fairly rural area ‘you can draw a ring around’. That isn’t the case for Oldham. It borders Tameside, Manchester, Rochdale. There are parts of the borough where one side of the street is Oldham council and the other side is another council.
