Leicester mayor urges the Government to lift local lockdown
The mayor of Leicester is urging the Government to lift the city-wide local lockdown this week and to replace it with more targeted measures.
A second review into the tighter lockdown restrictions imposed on the city of Leicester is due to be carried out this week.
Leicester became the first city in Britain to be placed in local lockdown on June 29, after a surge in coronavirus cases.
Since then, the lockdown restrictions have been lifted in some parts, but Leicester city, Oadby and Wigston still remain in lockdown.
Leicester City Council is asking to be allowed to target individual households by using Public Health England data to find out where someone has been infected and to help people within their households isolate for 14 days.
Leicester City Mayor, Sir Peter Soulsby, said "we are seeing a reduction in the number of new cases even with the very much extended testing we are doing, and increasingly it seems like the most significant transmission of the virus is occurring within households, so that is where we believe efforts should be from now on."
He added that "at a very local level" some people "may be prevented from doing some things, and that would allow us to move away from a full city-wide lockdown".
Conservative Harborough MP Neil O'Brien, who represents Oadby and Wigston, said the Government must be clearer with the public about how it will come to its conclusions:
“At the moment my constituents are living under all kinds of restrictions, but aren’t being told, even roughly, under what conditions they’ll be ended."
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) will make a decision on what happens next before August 1.
The City Council has not got a meeting scheduled with the Secretary of State yet but the city mayor says they are expecting to be able to speak to him.
Coronavirus cases in Leicester:
At present, the seven day rate of infection in the city is 58.6 casesper 100,000.
That is lower than last week when it was 77 cases, and lower still than the 135 cases per 100,000 which was the level when the city was pushed into the UK’s first local lockdown.
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