Why here? Why now?
WE ANSWER SOME OF THE KEY QUESTIONS RAISED BY THE NEW LOCKDOWN RULES
WHEN the health secretary announced new lockdown measures for Greater Manchester on Thursday night, confusion followed.
That focused to a large extent on what exactly the measures were but also the reasoning.
Many have questioned the rationale for the new limits, from the geographical footprint to the timing and the data that triggered the move.
We can’t answer all those questions definitively, but we have spoken to lots of people working at a senior level within the system here and studied the data to try and provide a clearer picture.
Here we try to answer some of the key queries.
Surely there isn’t a problem hospital admissions are low?
It’s true hospital admissions are still very low in Greater Manchester, according to the mayor and public health officials, and have been low for some time.
Andy Burnham addressed this point on Wednesday last week, the day before the new lockdown measures were announced.
The lack of a rise in hospital admissions, even though infection rates are increasing, led them ‘to conclude the rise in the number of positive cases is amongst the younger population’, he told Times Radio.
“So this is an issue we’ve got a very, very close eye on indeed right now.”
Little more than 24 hours later, Matt Hancock announced the new restrictions, after the Chief Medical Officer and others examined the same infection data.
They have acted because although low hospital admissions - a pattern across the country - are good news, public health experts are still worried by the rise in cases for several reasons.
Firstly, there is growing evidence that Covid-19 can damage your health afterwards even if you don’t need admitting to hospital, including longterm damage to the lungs. That can include younger people too.
Secondly, younger people can then transmit the virus to people who are more vulnerable to becoming seriously ill. And new cases, they believe, appear to be accelerating fast in several areas.
And finally, there does tend to be a lag in these numbers. They don’t know whether the pattern of hospital admissions - and deaths - could be about to change.
Has there really been that much of an infection rate increase?
Clearly, this does depend on exactly where you live.
Some parts of Greater Manchester do have rates that are pretty low notably Wigan, where the infection rate was still in single figures in the week to last Thursday.
However apart from in Rochdale, where numbers are still fairly high but have been falling after targeted measures were introduced earlier in July, the rates have been rising everywhere after weeks of broadly going the right way.
Meanwhile in several places that increase has been significant.
Oldham remains the area of most concern to officials: rates towards the end of the week were around 60 per 100,000.
That’s above the government’s internal ‘red’ warning threshold for infection rates and places it in the top authorities nationally. Oldham recorded its highest daily case number last Tuesday since May 9.
However, it isn’t just an Oldham issue. Trafford’s numbers had risen dramatically before the new measures were introduced - from 8 cases per 100,000 to more than 40 in the space of a week, although the rate of increase may now have slowed a little.
Manchester’s infection rates have continued to rise too, more than doubling from 16 per 100,000 to 35 in the week to last Wednesday. In the week to Friday, they city recorded its highest case number since May 24.
Stockport has seen a rise from single figures to 26 cases per 100,000 in a week, while Tameside has seen a similar increase.
The logic for those announcing last week’s measures was that while the picture varies, they want to slow that trend right down.
And given Greater Manchester tends to function as one unit in some respects, with people crossing borders constantly to socialise and go to work, they decided to apply them to the entire conurbation.
Was this done because of Eid?
Eid al-Adha began on Friday and, for a festival that by its nature involves people going into each other’s houses for celebrations, it logically can’t have been completely absent from the minds of those making the decision at the back end of last week.
That’s presumably even more the case considering BAME people are more at risk from the virus in the first place.
Nevertheless, nobody spoken to by the M.E.N. within the system here says