THE MARCH OF COVID-19 ACROSS THE CITY

DON’T LOWER GUARD, SAYS EXPERT, AS NEW MAP SHOWS VIRUS SPREAD

THE number of new cases of coronavirus is no longer a problem largely concentrated in the east of Leicester, but is spreading across the city, writes Dan Martin.

Leicester City Council has released its latest analysis and a map showing new cases are now being identified more widely across the city.

It has led to public health officials urging people to stick to the rules restricting social gathering in homes and gardens and new national limitations.

Data from the peak of the outbreak in June showed infections were concentrated mainly in areas such as Belgrave, Highfields and North

Evington, but now the spread has widened to areas including Mowmacre, Stocking Farm and the West End.

Rob Howard, city council consultant in public health, said: “We know if people let their guard down then the virus will come again.”

THE number of new cases of coronavirus is no longer a problem largely concentrated in the east of Leicester, public health officials have warned, but is spreading across the city.

Leicester City Council has released its latest analysis of new cases of Covid-19 and has produced a map showing they are now being identified more widely across the city.

Data from the peak of the outbreak in Leicester in June showed infections were concentrated mainly in areas such as Belgrave, Highfields and North Evington but now, as the number of cases has started to rise, in line with elsewhere in the country, the spread has widened across the city to areas including Mowmacre, Stocking Farm and the West End.

At one point earlier in the local lockdown, which began at the end of June, the city council said the outbreak was happening in only 10 per cent of the city.

However, Rob Howard, city council consultant in public health, told the Mercury that the latest assessment of new cases from the start of this month told a very different story.

He said: “At the end of August we had a few days of nine or 10 or 15 cases, then on September 1 it went up to 30, then the next day 43, then it carried on and we had three days of more than 50 in a row - and that worried us.”

Mr Howard said the city council’s outbreak management team, which meets three times a week and looks in detail at the figures, kept on top of the new cases to try to understand them.

“It is quite a different pattern to what we saw before,” he said. “It was much more dispersed across the whole city.

“In the past, the concentration of new virus cases has been really concentrated in the north and east of the city - the inner city areas like Belgrave and Spinney Hill and North Evington.

“But now, it’s come up to Hamilton now. It’s down in Stoneygate.

“There are patches in the west of the city - in Rowley Fields and the West End.

“Now it’s much broader and across the whole city.”

Further maps show the progression of new cases across the city week-by-week from early August to early September.

A city council spokesman said: “In the past four weeks we have seen the pattern of Covid-19 infections change in Leicester.

“In the maps we can see how the concentrations of positive cases in Belgrave and North Evington eased towards the end of August.

“In the first week of September you can see a much wider spread of positive tests.”

Mr Howard added: “We are now at a double whammy where there are still continuous areas, but it is far broader across the whole city. “We couldn’t really explain it by looking at specific workplaces or particular events.”

He said the trend had continued at that level of 30 or 40 or 60 cases a day.

He said the data showed younger people were increasingly catching the virus.

He added: “We started to see a general rise across the city and it’s not exclusively young people, but there are more cases among young people as they start to go out more and mix a bit more.

“We still have an issue in the east of the city, we still need to focus there and we are still doing door-todoor asking people to make sure households don’t mix and to get tested if they have symptoms.”

He urged people to stick to the city-wide rules restricting social gathering in homes and gardens and new national limitations as a means to suppressing the virus

The strain on the national testing system had also an impact in the city.

Mr Howard said: “It’s really not helped by the fact that the national testing system has just been completely failing.”

He said the government track and trace teams would pass individuals over to local city council counterparts if they were unable to find someone who had tested positive within 24 hours.

Mr Howard said: “What the city council track and trace people are now finding are cases coming through to us of people who have tested positive in the past five to seven days.

“People, if they haven’t been contacted, they don’t know they have it, particularly if they have mild symptoms, and they haven’t been asked who their contacts are, so those contacts don’t know they are positive either and should be self-isolating.

“That’s disastrous for a contact system that is supposed to be worldbeating. It is a significant problem.”

He said until the testing and tracing issue was resolved, the city council would be putting out the message that if people have symptoms, they need to isolate straight away.

It’s a double whammy where there are still continuous areas, but it is far broader across the whole city Rob Howard