Locking down Cornwall and North Cumbria will not help Manchester

As the second wave of COVID-19 causes increasing problems and concern,  there has been fierce debate about how to deal with it, and I have seen many things on both print and social media both from those who think that the government should have taken even stronger action and from those who think that the government has done too much to restrict liberties.

There are no easy answers. As an oncologist, Professor Karol Sikora, wrote on the Spectator website today, "Covid-19 kills, but so does lockdown."

The figures show that, although mercifully the ratio between known infections and deaths this time round seems so far to be significantly lower than earlier in the year, we see a similar pattern of rising numbers to the one earlier in the year. Coronavirus infections have been on a rising trend since August, (in blue on the graph below with numbers on the left axis) and numbers in hospital for COVID-19 began to rise a few weeks later, and then deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate (on the right axis) have also been following infections upwards after a delay.

If we as a society - and I'm not just talking about the government - did nothing to prevent it the danger that those figures for deaths would continue to rise is too big to ignore.

However, the image above is a national graph, and although infections and the numbers in hospital have been creeping up almost everywhere in the UK, both the numbers and the rate of increase vary enormously from place to place. The measures which are right in one part of Britain will not be right for every other place.

I might have my reservations about the action just taken by the Welsh government, but they must do what they think is right for Wales - and the people of Wales can and should judge what they think of the outcome at the ballot box. Similarly I am with those MPs from the North West who politely asked MPs from elsewhere in the country not to write letters telling the North West to do.

Just as on another issue I had a letter in the Whitehaven News last week asking the MP and council leader for Westmorland and South Lakes to stop asking the government to over-ride local democratic decisions in Copeland. 

We all need to take action to control the virus but I agree with those who say that another national lockdown should only be used as a last resort.

I don't think we can totally rule it out, but it doesn't make sense on the information we have today. Locking down the whole of Cumbria (where five of the six districts have the five lowest incidence rates for COVID-19 in the North West) would not help Manchester. As the PM asked last week, how is shutting down businesses in Cornwall and other areas with very few cases of the Coronavirus going to reduce infection rates in Manchester, Liverpool or London?

I can't make any sense of the Labour position. 

A week ago the Labour Shadow Health Secretary warned that a protracted national lockdown, lasting weeks and weeks, would be ‘disastrous for society,’ but then Keith Starmer called for a "circuit breaker" national lockdown. 

Over the weekend senior Labour frontbenchers Rachel Reeve and Kate Green have confirmed that their leader’s call for a temporary full national lockdown could be anything but temporary, admitting it might well have to be repeated over and over again. Which sounds pretty much like the policy which Jonathan Ashworth said would be "disastrous for society."  

The government policy of seeking a balance guided by scientific advice to try to fight the virus without wrecking the economy has not pleased everyone, but Labour's attempt to run with the anti-lockdown hares while hunting with the pro-lockdown hounds may not go down any better with the electorate than their "constructive ambiguity" over Brexit did.

In the meantime we all need to continue to remember hands, face, space - wash your hands, cover your face when indoors in places with people outside your family group, and keep two metres of space.