Bristol’s director of public health has issued a stark reminder of how far we are from beating coronavirus by pointing out the city’s rate is still higher than the UK’s first local lockdown in Leicester.
There were 46 new cases per 100,000 population in Bristol from March 6 to March 12 – three less than the previous seven days, below England’s average of 59 and continuing the trend of a reduction in all areas of the city.
But as Ms Gray told health and wellbeing board members on Thursday (March 18), it is still worse than Leicester’s last year.
Anyone who remembers the Midlands city becoming the first in the country to be effectively shut down by the Government and shut off from the rest of the population in June 2020 will recall how shockingly high the infection rate appeared then.
Ms Gray told the Bristol board meeting: “It’s very good news that our background is down below 50 and still going down.
“The rate of reduction is slowing so we need to keep the pace on that downward trend.
“Just to keep reminding everybody that when Leicester city went into its lockdown last year, its rate was in the 30s, so we’ve got a very normalised, very high background rate of infection.
“We’re going in the right direction but we need to be driving this down and we need to be in single digits to be able to manage and prevent infection with test, trace and isolate effectively, so we still have a way to go.”
She said the R number in the South West, which measures the disease’s ability to spread, was below the magic number of one – between 0.5 and 0.8 – and the rate of positive tests had “reduced incredibly”, from 10 per cent at the board’s previous meeting to 1.8 per cent.
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“So that is really excellent news,” she said.
“What that tells us is that the background rate of infection is reducing.”
Last June, Health Secretary Matt Hancock ordered the UK’s first local lockdown in Leicester, with non-essential shops forced to close and people urged not to travel in or out of the area following a rise of infections.
