It is to be Preston next on local lockdown?

[Workingman]

There are calls for it to be the case.There has been a spike of 18 cases in one day, five times the daily average you see, and cases have more than doubled in the seven day period.

Well yes, in the period to 31st July there were 49 cases (ave 7 per day) up from the previous period with 22 cases (ave 3 per day). Yet since then and without further intervention the cases per day have dropped back to the long-term average for July, so why the big panic?

It is slightly different from Aberdeen where cases have been on a steady rise for the past week, but even there the daily average is now 8 where it once was 2 = 54 for the week in a population of 228,000. But even so, why the big panic?

It is interesting to note that both places have opted to prioritise local NHS and public health protection teams for testing and tracing over their national equivalents. Those will now be umbrella services running alongside the "boots on the ground" approaches. We should expect to see more like these as time goes on

The beauty of going local is that hotspots could be nailed down to smaller areas or groups, even families, within a locality and thus avoid the nuclear options of late. The one in GM - E. Lancs and parts of W. Yorks has arbitrary lines on a map splitting communities in half. One part of the street is in total lockdown where the other part is in the eased version - neighbour v neighbour.