A crisis that News lays bare the result of decades of inequality
GREATER MANCHESTER WALKING A TIGHTROPE THROUGH PANDEMIC
THE working week has begun with bad news for Matt Hancock. Not only has there been a spike in Covid cases nationally over the weekend, but people across the country are now struggling to access tests.
However, if the national picture is taking a turn for the worse, in Greater Manchester bad Covid news has been a fixture of pretty much the entire summer.
As a Public Health England report leaked to the Observer over the weekend concluded, the virus is endemic here. Echoing similar views expressed to the M.E.N. in August by local officials, it found that the first wave never went away in many of our boroughs.
Extra restrictions were initially introduced across the entire conurbation at the end of July as a result of rising rates. Oldham narrowly avoided an economic lockdown a few weeks later, before Bolton saw a dramatic and sudden spike in infections at the end of August.
Figures now show most of our local authorities in the government’s ‘red zone’ for infections, officially defined as more than 50 cases per 100,000 people.
Privately, senior local figures admit ministers could simply choose to shut some of our economy down this week, Leicester-style - although how likely that is, given the government’s mood music around reopening the economy and the politics of the former red wall, is debatable.
At the same time as our rates have increased, however, worried public health officials are also eyeing up the return of 100,000 students to Greater Manchester over the coming days.
Today the region is already dealing with more than a dozen school outbreaks, with more than 1,000 children self isolating.
Meanwhile people asking for tests via the government’s website are being sent as far away as Llandudno, Leicester and even Inverness, alongside a message this morning stating that there are currently no home tests available at all for Mancunians.
So Greater Manchester now has a serious situation on its hands, from a public health, economic and political point of view.
It is preparing a detailed ask of government after agreeing last week that the current approach of halfway house lockdown measures - which currently see four different sets of rules applied across the ten boroughs - isn’t the solution.
One major concern is the resulting impact that approach is having on the public health message.
“The message is so confusing: different things in different places, in or out, shake it all about,” says one official of the government’s ‘hokey cokey’ approach.
The messaging question is one that MPs have raised concerns about too.
O n Friday night, a few hours after announcing businesses such as casinos could open in most of Greater Manchester, the government suddenly announced extra social mixing restrictions in Bolton as a result of rocketing rates. The news broke at around 6pm.
Bolton South East’s Labour MP Yasmin Qureshi wrote to Matt Hancock over the weekend describing a ‘widespread feeling of exasperation and frustration with the way this has been handled’.
Against the backdrop of those concerns, Greater Manchester is drawing up a detailed practical request to government.
They believe extra resource and control over a localised testing and contact trace system is the single most important thing the government needs to provide. It is an argument they have been making for months, but they are now ramping it up.
Latest figures published by local authority last week show that not only is the national test and trace system not hitting its targets, but its success rate here is even lower than in England as a whole.
The emerging plans for a locallyrun system, which are being drawn up on behalf of the region by PricewaterhouseCoopers with the help of World Health Organisation expert
David Nabarro, propose a Germanstyle track and trace set-up, controlled not by outsourcers such as Serco but by public health departments here.
That would see part of the existing national team redeployed and ringfenced to Greater Manchester.
But even with a functioning test and trace system in place, an uneasy balancing act will remain for decision-makers both here and in Westminster.
As the nights draw in, Greater Manchester is walking a tightrope. Desperate not to lock down its economy, careful of maintaining a fragile political consensus, hopeful of finally convincing the government of its test and trace plans, working blind on what ministers might decide – and what the virus will do.
Succeeding will be crucial not just for the health of its population now, but well into the future.
As the Covid-19 case map of northern England demonstrates, this crisis lays bare just where decades of regional inequality can end up leading.