Mayor predicting city will reach whole year of lockdown restrictions

SIR PETER SAYS MORE MISERY AHEAD UNLESS GOVERNMENT ALTERS POLICY

LEICESTER could end up being in lockdown for a whole year, the city mayor has admitted.

“At the moment there is little prospect of release before the one-year anniversary,” Sir Peter Soulsby told the Mercury after the “inevitable” Tier 3 announcement was made, citing delays receiving data and issues with mass testing as some of the reasons.

The city found out this week that, along with large swathes of the Midlands, it will spend at least another fortnight under the strictest coronavirus restrictions again when the second national lockdown is lifted on Wednesday.

Sir Peter, pictured above right, fears it might be longer, saying he can’t see restrictions being lifted before March.

“We’ve already had two-thirds of a year with restrictions in place, and it’s hard to see how it won’t go the full year,” he said.

When, on Thursday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the nation that “your tier is not your destiny”, Leicester might be forgiven for disagreeing.

Today marks 152 days since a local lockdown was imposed, and 250 days since Leicester was last free of any level of Covid restrictions.

Since March 23, there hasn’t been a day where rules haven’t applied in Leicester. It is the only city in the country that has spent every day under some limitations – and at times the strictest level – since Mr Johnson announced the first national lockdown.

Seeing family and friends indoors has remained off-limits since March, with only a brief spell where people could meet in private gardens announced just prior to the current lockdown.

Shutters have remained down on businesses in the city longer than anywhere else and schools were also forced to close to all but key workers’ children.

As the Health Secretary sang the praises of Liverpool for bringing rates down enough to go into Tier 2, many people cited Leicester as an example of lockdowns not working.

But the data shows that it, along with mass testing, did.

At the end of August, the seven-day infection rate had dropped from the 135 cases per 100,000 population that sent it into the first local lockdown, to 23.1 cases per 100,000 – around the same as the national average at the time.

“We made a huge effort with testing and it worked, but lockdown wasn’t lifted,” Sir Peter explained.

“It’s something we’d like to do again, it’s something that would allow us to do the same as Liverpool and drive rates right back down, but we can’t do it without the government’s support.”

Red tape and buraucracy mean that, while Leicester has been issued with mass testing kits, it has still not been sent the bar codes that allow them to be used, so instead of swabbing getting started, all the kits remain in storage.

The other reasons Sir Peter says he can foresee restrictions remaining in place are things he has repeatedly raised before, such as data and the criteria outlining how we get out.

“If the government would tell us who has tested positive, give us that information, we could be tracking and tracing people and reducing the spread. It is that simple,” he said.

“All it would take is for them to copy us into an e-mail. Tell us who the people who have tested positive are at the same time as the national test and trace people and we can set about finding them and instructing them to isolate.

“We have the teams, the local knowledge, the will to do it.

“And just as important is having a target,” Sir Peter said.

“There are a lot of miserable people in this city, there are a lot of people in this city who have stuck to the rules throughout and see no reward.

“When the rates did come right down, we still weren’t released from local lockdown.

“That doesn’t give people the faith, the belief, the encouragement to do it again.

“We know that cases in the over-60s will be considered, we know that cases, in general, will be looked at, as will infection rates and hospital admissions, but we don’t know what is being looked for, we don’t know where we need to be to get out, what those numbers need to say for us move down tiers.

“That remains a subjective thing.”