Leicester is to be put under a tighter lockdown than the rest of country from Tuesday after the English city reported an increase in coronavirus cases, confronting the government with the first test of its ability to control the virus while opening up the economy.
Health secretary Matt Hancock said non-essential shops had been told to close on Tuesday and schools asked to shut their doors to the majority of their pupils from Thursday. Classes will remain open for vulnerable children and children of critical workers.
But the city’s mayor and a local senior doctor criticised the way the testing system was working, complaining about the lack of data at local level and efficacy of the track and trace system. A spike of more than 900 cases since mid-June, which local officials were only made aware of late last week, had led Public Health England (PHE) to support the first big “local lockdown”.
Speaking in the Commons on Monday evening, Mr Hancock confirmed that the planned loosening of measures allowing pubs and restaurants to reopen across England from July 4 would not take place in Leicester. Nor would the relaxation of measures for those vulnerable people who are shielding take place on July 6, he added.
“We’ll review if we can release any of the measures in two weeks,” he said, adding that 10 per cent of all positive cases detected in the country over the past week had been detected in the East Midlands city, which has a population of 350,000.
“Given the growing outbreak in Leicester we cannot recommend that the easing of the national lockdown set to take place on July 4 happens in Leicester,” Mr Hancock told MPs.
“We recommend to people in Leicester, stay at home as much as you can, and we recommend against all but essential travel to, from and within Leicester.” Tighter restrictions would also apply to the suburbs surrounding the city, Mr Hancock added.
Prime minister Boris Johnson had told the BBC earlier in the day that a local “whack-a-mole” strategy used to deal with outbreaks in Weston-super-Mare and around GP surgeries in London would be “brought to bear in Leicester as well”.
Peter Soulsby, the city’s Labour mayor, who had earlier on Monday questioned the need for the lockdown, sounded a more supportive note after Mr Hancock’s statement, saying he understood the need for firm action. “I am determined that we will make this work and minimise the time these additional measures need to be in place in the city.”
But on Tuesday morning, Sir Peter urged the government to work more closely with local officials in future, complaining about the lack of detailed testing data at the subnational level. Published data for Leicester recorded just 80 new positive tests between June 13-26 but Mr Hancock revealed that there were in fact 944.
The subnational data that the government publishes on new UK cases is only for tests processed by hospitals, known as Pillar 1. Tests done at government centres or at home, which are processed by commercial labs and called Pillar 2, are not made public. Yet these account for the majority of tests.
Leicester city council’s public health department only received those figures last Thursday. They could not compare with places elsewhere because those Pillar 2 figures are only made available to local officials in their own local authority area provided they have signed the Data Protection Act.
Sir Peter told BBC Breakfast on Tuesday that the government must work more closely with him in future. “For weeks we have been trying to get information about the level of testing in the city and the results of that testing in the city.
“It was only last Thursday we got the first batch of that data. I hope that now they have recognised the need to work with use they will be providing us the information we need.
“I would wish that they had shared that [data] with us right from the start, and I wish they had taken a more speedy decision rather than leaving it 11 days. That’s a long gap and a long time for the virus to spread.”
Kamlesh Khunti, professor of primary care diabetes and vascular medicine at Leicester university and a local GP, said it was impossible to compare with national figures because data from central testing programmes was not routinely published by the government. “We are in a data vacuum,” he said.
Prof Khunti said the fact the outbreak could get so bad so quickly showed that the system to trace contacts of infected people and ask them to quarantine was not working, especially in inner city areas. “We will see other spikes because we have not got a full blown test, trace and isolate operation like other countries.”
A member of the Independent Sage group of advisers often critical of government policy, Prof Khunti said enlisting black and ethnic minority community groups to emphasise that social distancing was still necessary could be the best way to tackle the outbreak. “It is about working with inner-city, Bame intergenerational, multilingual families with high risk factors for this disease.”
The outbreak is among younger people who often display few symptoms of infection. However, many live with elderly relatives in the tight-packed housing of east Leicester where the outbreak has occurred. The city is home to many people of Indian and Pakistani heritage, who have died disproportionately from the disease.
Meanwhile, Greece has extended a ban on tourism from the UK and Sweden at least until July 15, reversing a decision to allow direct flights from all western European countries on July 1.
Haris Theocharis, the tourism minister, told the Financial Times: “Our priority is safety, not numbers [of visitors].”
He added: “I think it’s likely that UK tourists will be able to come after the middle of the month.”
Normally, more than 3m tourists from the UK visit Greece every year, the second-largest national group after Germany.
Greece’s success to date in limiting the spread of coronavirus makes it an especially attractive destination this year. The country has recorded 191 deaths after 3,390 infections, with a current “R” transmission number of 0.3, according to EODY, the state public health organisation.
Additional reporting by Kerin Hope in Athens
