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Fiona fox's blog
On Tuesday 21st October the government reported 26,688 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the UK.
Dr Stephen Griffin, Associate Professor in the School of Medicine, University of Leeds, said:
“The latest numbers today continues a worrying trend over the past few weeks and clearly support that the virus is continuing to spread exponentially across the entire UK.
“It is difficult to understand why urgent action is not being taken on a national level, as advised by SAGE, independent SAGE and many other observers. This is a UK wide problem. If we wait for other areas to reach prevalence as we are seeing in the North of England then the situation will be grim indeed. I see no evidence that localised measures are capable of reversing the growth of this resurgence and the longer inaction persists, the more protracted and severe the measures will need to be in order to regain control. The pain of the previous lockdown has been squandered, the summer has been wasted. The commitment to suppressing cases and organising effective testing was not met.
“Critically, I am aghast that shielding remains paused. Whilst it saddens me to see that this is once again our only recourse to protect those most vulnerable to COVID, they must be enabled both socially and financially to protect themselves once more
“Whatever transpires as a result of policy, it must be accompanied by a return to the commitments made earlier this year. Most importantly, testing must be overhauled.”
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
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