Freedom Day is not a free-for-all... it is when the responsibility falls to us
AN awful lot of fuss has been made about so-called Freedom Day next week. What’s becoming very clear is that it isn’t the end of the pandemic, merely the end of the beginning.
We’re at the point where the Government, rightly or wrongly, feels it no longer has to legislate to keep us safe. Ministers are essentially saying it’s now down to us to keep ourselves safe.
That’s very different from the Government telling us the world is as safe as it was prepandemic.
It’s where broader social responsibility becomes really important. The latest data for the East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust shows a steady increase in daily admissions to the hospital for Covid. In April, after the second wave (or was it third, given we endured Tier 3 for so long in the winter?) hospital admissions dropped to one or two a day (compared to 60 at peak).
Steadily over the last month, they’ve risen to seven cases into the hospital a day - still a long way from the peak of 60 a day, but still evidence that the risk certainly has not gone away - as is the fact that 18 patients are receiving ventilation as they fight Covid. That’s the highest since March.
In total, there are 56 people receiving treatment in East Lancashire’s hospitals for
Covid at the moment. Overall, 5,244 have been treated at our hospitals since the pandemic began.
None of this is meant to scare people, or to argue for a return to lockdown measures seen earlier this year - but to highlight the risks that are still there.
Sometimes, the data we get shown every day doesn’t really mean very much.
We’ve heard in the last few weeks that Rossendale has been in the top 10 in England for infection rates - but that’s driven as much by the total number of people who can be infected, as it is by the number of people who are being infected.
So with a population of 70,000, two people testing positive is going to be twice as high an infection rate as two people in a borough like Blackburn, which has 148,000 residents.
Government data shows that 8,509 people in Rossendale have tested positive since the start of the pandemic - just over 10% of the population as recorded by Government.
Worrying, however, is that the confirmed infections are now higher, on a daily basis, than the peak of the January infections. In some days during the last week, 80 people a day have tested positive.
Deaths, thankfully, remain infrequent. We’ve lost 151 people in Rossendale during the pandemic to Covid directly. That figure rises to 180 when people who had Covid listed as a cause on their death certificate are added in. There was one such case last week.
And for every death there is, there are families and friends left behind, who have lost a loved one.
So often during the pandemic, we’ve seen the Rossendale community come together to pull through this awful time. Monday isn’t Freedom Day - such a silly term - it’s a moment in time where the Government devolves responsibility for looking after each other to us.
You can debate whether that’s the right thing for a Government to do at this moment in time. But looking after each other is what we’ve been doing all along, and that is what we need to keep on doing.