Leicester City Mayor's statement on lockdown

[Bruce Stephens]

https://www.leicester.gov.uk/media/186760/leicester-in-lockdown-july-2020.pdf

 

[Docb]

Wow.

 

[Amity Island]

https://www.leicester.gov.uk/media/186760/leicester-in-lockdown-july-2020.pdf

So, there was no request to bring in a lockdown after all!

Also it is fair to say as the document says, that increased testing will likely bring increased cases. How do you get around this phenomena? If they at some point ramp up testing (as trump has being saying) up goes the stats for covid19 infection. In comes the second wave!!!

 

[Bruce Stephens]

So, there was no request to bring in a lockdown after all!

Not from the original PHE report, no.

Also it is fair to say as the document says, that increased testing will likely bring increased cases. How do you get around this phenomena?

You need the context (as the letter say). How many people in total have been tested? Who were they (and why were they tested)? Without proper sampling there's presumably some element of judgement. (Annoyingly, it seems likely that just having symptomatic people isolating isn't sufficient to reduce infections: there's enough presymptomatic and asymptomatic spread.)

So if I understand correctly they were testing people reporting symptoms and healthcare workers and so on, and they (sensibly) started to test more asymptomatic people. And as you say, that'll produce more positive test results. Finding more infected people is a good thing (you then ought to follow up their contacts and test them), but it's also a bit of a weak signal for a lockdown.

My guess is the government wanted to give the impression that they have a grip of the pandemic and are able to do local lockdowns when necessary. Leicester was just unlucky. (Though maybe there's a higher rate of infection there, it seems like their local team could have handled it had they had the information.)

 

[atoll]

this sounds like a classic british problem........where one department does not talk to the other department leaving both departments in the dark....usually attributed to lack of joined up thinking exercised by bureaucracy ...........
god help us jan 1st when border,customs,health,quarentine,immigration,inland revenue etc all have to work together

 

[Bruce Stephens]

this sounds like a classic british problem........where one department does not talk to the other department leaving both departments in the dark....usually attributed to lack of joined up thinking exercised by bureaucracy ...........

That's part of it, I think, but there's a strong element of something even worse: the local public health people want information about occupations and ethnic backgrounds and the like. They want the details. And it seems quite likely that the English testing system (the Pillar 2 system) isn't collecting all of that information.