Outbreaks will be kept quiet to avoid ‘tensions’
Location of Covid spikes can’t be revealed, says health chief
THE public will not be given a full picture of where coronavirus cases are to protect people who test positive from possible hate attacks.
The precise locations of any small outbreaks in schools, workplaces or communities will remain a closely guarded secret, says Public Health England’s deputy director for the West Midlands, Dr Helen Carter.
She said news of positive incidents in workplaces and households had already triggered ‘‘community tensions’’.
“We have had some incredibly upset people who have spoken of neighbours not speaking to them, of communities not being supportive,” she said.
“Having supported some incredibly distressed members of the public there is an element of wanting to protect them from quite nasty hate crimes.”
Dr Carter added: “We are confident that at this moment in time we do not have a Leicester scenario happening in our patch.
“But we rely on people who develop symptoms to stay home, get tested, and do not go into work or college. I cannot stress that strongly enough.
“If we do not all do that, we run the risk of becoming a Leicester-style scenario.
“There is still virus circulating in communities and it does worry me a lot when I see photos of groups gathering, like a recent situation of people in the Bullring gathering, not adhering to social distancing.
“Or we speak to people who have a confirmed case and we interview them and learn they have been travelling long distances, car sharing with other people without wearing a mask, or other situations. It is a difficult situation to navigate.”
Figures showed Birmingham has had nearly 5,000 positive cases confirmed throughout the pandemic, the equivalent of 422.5 cases per 100,000 residents.
The most recent data, for the week ending July 6, showed the rate of new positive cases was 6.3 per 100,000 residents.
That works out at roughly 72 new cases in a week, based on the city’s population of 1.14 million people.
Dr Carter said: “We are going to see cases in workplaces, schools, care homes.
“This is the new world we are going to be in until either they develop a vaccine or the virus totally dies away or we get herd immunity.
“We are such a long way off herd immunity – we would need about 95 per cent of the population with immunity, when we have around three per cent nationally – so this is going to be the new normal.
“Our request of the public is to be extra vigilant, we all have a role to play.”
Dr Carter would not give figures on current outbreaks in community settings like workplaces, or care homes nor would she say where any community incidents were.
This was in order to protect the identities of those affected, she said.
Telling people about every instance where there is a case or two linked to a school or place of work would be “misleading” and problematic, she claimed, and doing so would lead to risk of misinformation, community tensions and hate crimes.
She said: “When we get the complicated cases referred to us from contact tracing, for example, people in healthcare settings, schools, workplaces, then we take a very detailed history of where they have been and what they have done.
“We do not say publicly where each of those incidents are.
“This is because they first need to establish if any apparent connection is genuine – for example, two workers at the same factory might test positive, but further inquiries may establish the factory is not itself implicated, or they have never worked together.
“We might not know it’s an outbreak until we investigate, and once we know there is an outbreak we will be developing outbreak plans including communication plans.”
“At that point, as in the case of the Tulip food factory in Tipton, where several of the workforce have been infected, publicity would follow.
“But we are going to get small incidents in schools and workplaces. This is not unexpected.
“The other aspect – and we have seen this in Leicester – is around the community tension and targeting when people can identify who the positive case is or their workplace.”
This is new world we until they develop a vaccine, the virus totally dies away, or we get herd immunity Dr Helen Carter