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Matt Hancock, the UK’s Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, said at last night’s government press briefing that local lockdowns will be used for virus flare-ups as part of the NHS’s Test and Trace system.
Prof Keith Neal, Emeritus Professor of the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases, University of Nottingham, said:
“The application of different targeted control measures across the country makes a lot of sense. The epidemic is at different stages across different parts of the UK. This is not one pandemic but a series of local epidemics all occurring at the same time. Policy in Northern Ireland should in many ways be drawn up in conjunction with the Republic. In Scotland the Outer Hebrides, Orkneys and Shetlands could easily be following different policies to the rest of Scotland.
“When policies are different they need to be understandable to people on both sides of the border. Some local authority boundaries run down the middle of roads so it would not be understandable for one side of a street to have one policy and the other side to be different.
“Targeting a small local outbreak with contact tracing would not need a change in lockdown policy, but local action isolating cases and contacts.
“Local lockdowns would only need to apply if there was a larger resurgence of cases in an identified area such as a city, town or village as determined by the epidemiology. This would allow people to be restricted in activities only as far as is necessary. An increase in cases in one part of the country does not require the same measures in other parts of the country especially if cases remained low in that area and or was at the other end of the country. What happens in Land’s End and John O’Groats is very likely to be completely different and require different measures.”
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