A list of 38 new areas have been added to the coronavirus ‘watch list’ this week as the number of cases continues to soar across England.
That now means there is a total of 92 places on the list, including all 33 London boroughs.
Four areas have been escalated to the ‘areas of intervention’ list – so places put into lockdown lockdown – these are Leeds, Stockport, Wigan and Blackpool.
There are 48 areas in local lockdown, and it is estimated around 17 million British people are now living under some kind of restrictions.
Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland and Stockton-on-Tees, all in Teesside, have been escalated to ‘areas of enhanced support’, which means they could be the next places put in local lockdown.
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Every London borough is now an ‘area of concern’, which include: Barking and Dagenham, Barnet, Bexley, Brent, Bromley, Camden, City of London, Croydon, Ealing, Enfield, Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham, Haringey, Harrow, Havering, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Islington, Kensington and Chelsea, Kingston upon Thames, Lambeth, Lewisham, Merton, Newham, Redbridge, Richmond upon Thames, Southwark, Sutton, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest, Wandsworth and Westminster.
Hertsmere, Scarborough, Selby, Sheffield and Spelthorne remain on the ‘areas of concern’ list and have not moved since last week.
The four areas removed from the watch list completely are Corby, Northampton, Peterborough and Stoke-on-Trent.
A number of towns across the UK went into local lockdown from midnight – including Leeds, Wigan, Stockport, Blackpool and Llanelli in Carmarthenshire.
Wales’s two largest cities, Cardiff and Swansea, will follow suit as of midnight tonight.
Scientists have warned the UK’s R rate, which measures how quickly Covid-19 is spreading, is up once again from last week.
Data released yesterday by the Government Office for Science and the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) shows the estimate for R for the whole of the UK is between 1.2 and 1.5.
It comes after there have been a further 6,874 cases of coronavirus recorded in the UK in the last 24 hours – another record increase for a single day.
The figures are up marginally on Thursday, when there were 6,634 positive tests, and brings the total number of cases to 423,236.
It’s the second day in a row when the number of new cases announced is higher than at any point during the pandemic.
Having not seen 6,000 cases a day since early May, the country has now breached this threshold for three days in a row. It comes amid fears of further lockdown restrictions across the country.
The full list of the 92 areas is listed in the box below.
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