What areas of England could go into local lockdown next and what are Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 testing?
Leicester has become the first British area to see lockdown measures re-introduced as the rest of the UK’s restrictions are lessened, but it could soon not be the only one.
Data from Public Health England has revealed that some areas have a worrying amount of coronavirus infections as figures show new confirmed cases have been rising across these upper-tier local English authorities in as lockdown measures ease.
There are 36 areas ‘at risk’ of seeing local lockdowns, which PHE and Department of Health sources told Sky News could be ‘just days away’.
Meanwhile, it was reported on Tuesday that hundreds of local authorities were missing Covid-19 testing data.
Public health bodies have access to the full data but local authorities do not have access automatically and, according to data obtained by the Leicester Mercury, the Government’s publicly-accessible Covid tracker omitted over 90 per cent of the city’s most recent cases – showing only one of the two ‘testing Pillars’.
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What areas of the UK could go into local lockdown next?
The 36 areas widely reported to be ‘at risk’ of re-implemented lockdown measures are:
- Barking and Dagenham
- Brent
- Derbyshire
- Doncaster
- Ealing
- Enfield
- Gateshead
- Gloucestershire
- Hammersmith and Fulham
- Haringey
- Harrow
- Havering
- Hounslow
- Isle of Wight
- Kensington and Chelsea
- Leicester – which already has a local lockdown in place
- Medway
- Milton Keynes
- Plymouth
- Portsmouth
- Redbridge
- Redcar and Cloveland
- Richmond upon Thames
- Sandwell
- Slough
- Suffolk
- Sunderland
- Tower Hamlets
- Wakefield
- Walsall
- Wandsworth
- Westminster
- Wigan
- Wiltshire
- Windsor and Maidenhead
- York
What are Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 testing?
According to the UK Government website, case numbers are divided between two pillars.
Pillar 1 includes figures collected from NHS labs while Pillar 2 includes figures collected from commercial testing partners such as universities and companies like Boots.
The national total includes all these figures, whereas data published on the government Covid tracker only shows Pillar 1 figures in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Meanwhile Pillar 2 data is just included in the data for Wales.
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