WORST 20 VIRUS OUTBREAKS IN ENGLAND

A digital billboard in Bradford city centre warns the public about keeping safe.

The government has drawn up a list of 20 councils facing the worst coronavirus outbreaks in England, with Bradford, Sheffield and Kirklees identified as areas needing “enhanced support”, according to a classified document leaked to the Observer and the Guardian.

As evidence mounts that the relaxation of lockdown rules is leading to a resurgence of Covid-19 in some of England’s most deprived and ethnically mixed areas, officials have ordered the army to deploy extra mobile testing units, which will be sent into a series of hotspots around the country from this weekend.

Public Health England (PHE), the country’s lead infection control agency, 

briefed local government health chiefs last week that ministers were considering publishing a ranking of the 10 councils most affected by new outbreaks, which could be released within days. Councils fear the data will be used to enforce more local lockdowns of the kind imposed in Leicester, where all but essential shops must stay shut, schoolchildren have been sent home, and pubs and restaurants remain closed.

The top 10 ranking is likely to be based on a document circulated to local health chiefs on Thursday, headed “official sensitive”. The chart, compiled by PHE and reproduced here, ranks the 20 councils with the highest proportion of positive cases. Leicester remains at its head, with 5.7% of individuals who underwent a test found to have the virus. Kirklees, in West Yorkshire, was not far behind, with a 5% rate. Bradford, and Blackburn with Darwen in Lancashire, were the next highest.

Titled “local authority areas of interest”, the table is based on testing between 21 June and 4 July. It identifies six areas of “concern”. More serious cases are labelled as needing “enhanced support”, with three councils in this category. One – Leicester – is listed as requiring “intervention”.

The document states “these areas are currently under investigation by the local public health protection teams”. “Testing access is being increased in areas including Bradford”, it says, and the areas listed are “associated with workplace outbreaks which have contributed to the increase in infection rates”.

Last month, 164 workers at a meat factory in Kirklees tested positive, and at the beginning of July, a bed factory in Batley, which is administered by Kirklees Council, was closed after eight workers were found to have the virus.The communities most affected have several factors in common: poverty, poor health and a high proportion of non-white residents.

The top 10 is likely to change daily, although some areas will remain severely affected for weeks, health directors believe.

 

 

“Those on the list are going to be characterised by higher deprivation, higher black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities and denser housing,” said a public health director briefed on the plans.

“Some are going to be in the list for the whole period of the pandemic. The drivers are structural and demographic, so the pattern of spread will reflect the inequalities that already existed. Some of the most strapped-for-cash councils are going to be dealing with some of the worst outbreaks.”

Areas with large south Asian populations, particularly where several generations may share a home and live in crowded conditions, are among those emerging as particularly at risk.

Hand sanitiser at Kober meat processing plant in Cleckheaton, confirmed as the location of a localised coronavirus outbreak.

Bradford has the highest proportion of people of Pakistani origin in England.

The council has today deployed testing units, staffed by the armed forces, to its Bowling and Keighley districts. Residents will be able to be tested without an appointment. Similar units will be deployed in Blackburn and Sheffield.

“Bradford has a higher infection rate than most but it’s coming down due to action we’ve taken,” said council leader Susan Hinchcliffe.  “We welcome the dialogue with government.  We’re already doing more testing than any other authority in the region, but want to do more.”

Bradford has asked for its own mobile testing units, more environmental health officers, support to pay full wages to low-paid workers having to self-isolate, and funding to develop its own local test-and-trace system.

Officials have not yet outlined what metrics will be used to impose further lockdowns, but it is understood a system based on the German model is under discussion.  This would involve a threshold of 50 weekly positive tests per 100,000 of the population in any given council.  Once that is breached, special measures could be triggered.

Data made public on Thursday shows Leicester is currently on 116 new cases per 100,000 of population per week, down from 140 two weeks ago.

Rochdale is in second place, with nearly 33 cases, down from over 50 three weeks ago.  Kirklees is also suffering high rates, as are Bradford, Blackburn with Darwen, Rotherham and Bedford.

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced the UK’s first local lockdown on 29 June as Leicester reported 944 new cases in a fortnight.  Non-essential shops and schools were shut, and pubs and restaurants were unable to reopen. 

Legislation to enforce the restrictions was pushed through parliament.

Desperate to avoid Leicester’s fate, councils are lobbying for a “graded response”, the local public health director said, with a rolling back of some elements of lockdown, such as larger gatherings, rather than closure of whole sectors. “What we want to avoid is the secretary of state making clumsy, unhelpful interventions, so we are getting ahead of the curve, understanding what our problem is and acting to address it.  But we are hampered by slow reporting of data and absence of data,” they added.

Councils have only just begun to receive a breakdown of new cases by postcode, and this is arriving weekly.  Health chiefs say they need the information daily if they are to spot outbreaks in time to stop them spreading.

The plans to publish a top 10 were discussed on a regional call with Public Health England, two public health directors confirmed.  “They seem to be intent on putting it into the public domain,” said one of those on the call.  “We have expressed some concerns over how they do it, as the data does need to be interpreted. Nonetheless, I welcome transparency.”

The classified list of 20 at-risk councils uses six metrics including number of cases per 100,000 of population per week and per day, percentage of individuals testing positive as a proportion of all tests, and “exceedances”.  This is where councils are issued with a red light because they consistently have more positive cases than forecast by a government algorithm. A slightly lower number of exceedances leads to an amber light.

The chart also shows the number of community outbreaks per council over the last week. Outbreaks are classed as two or more positive tests in a single setting, such as a workplace, school or prison.

The Department of Health and Social Care said it did not have a set trigger, but would use a range of data to decide where and how to act, stating:  “We have been transparent about our response to coronavirus and are always looking to improve the data we publish, including the way we update testing statistics.

“The list of the 10 local authorities with the highest weekly incidence of coronavirus is already publicly available in PHE’s weekly surveillance report.

“All councils in England now have the ability to access testing data, right down to an individual and postcode level.  If councils feel they require more assistance with data, of course, PHE is able to help them.”

Kirklees and Sheffield councils were approached for comment.

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'Ought Sexual Grooming to be Nationalised under Workers' Control?' asks Mack-the-Knife

GIVEN the recent revelations in the case of Sir Cyril Smith, Jimmy Savile in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, one has to ask if the spirit and nature of sexual dalliances, seduction and grooming has not declined over the years.  A letter in tomorrow's Rochdale Observer certainly set me thinking that something has gone seriously wrong with sexual grooming in the age in which we now live:  Alan Richardson writing a Readers' Letters to the editor argues that 'What Sir Cyril is alleged to have done was common practice at the time (the 1960s & 70s)' and furthermore 'In the 1950s it was common practice for school boys as young as nine to have the cane and as an eleven year old, I along with about 30 others were given the slipper on our bare backside because someone did something wrong and would not own up.'  All good clean fun and punishment for the lads concerned and the perpetrator no doubt; I write 'lads concerned' because it would not likely be girls that got battered as that would not have been acceptable even then.

(Mr. Alan Richardson, may well be the same Alan Richardson who was in the year under me at Brimrod Secondary Modern School in Rochdale in the early 1950s; so I know precisely what he is talking about.)
How right Mr. Richardson is can be judged by the low level that miscreants now conduct their 'sexual grooming' in the backs of taxis or the environs of local oriental takeaways, compared with the days of yore, when Sir Cyril administered his huge hand on the bare buttocks of the residents in the splendors of the 'Quiet Room' at Cambridge House on Mere Street in Rochdale centre.  There doesn't seem to be any romance any more!  At least Sir Cyril applied a wet sponge to the backsides and uttered 'There, there!' to the lads, who may well have been sobbing their hearts out.  At least the school-masters wielding their canes and slippers with such gusto, had to fill-in the Black Punishment Book after working up a sweat with the slipper in the staff changing room at Brimrod Secondary Modern School.

All we getting now is bunga-bunga on the backseats of taxis around town as young lasses are forced to do their bit amid the debris, the discarded pizza packets and the smell of curry.  This shift away from the kind of institutionalised or even nationalised punishment on the welfare state to a version of free-lance sex and violence linked to the local takeaways; suggests a serious decline in the standards of sexual grooming in our time.  This surely we must put down to the rise of the free market and Thatcherism in the 1980s and the BIG BANG?  Gone is Sir Cyril Smith with his tender loving care and wet sponge and in comes Hayak and Herbert Spencer, the degenerate Darwinism of  Friedrich August Hayek and the survival of the fittest.

What we need now comrades is a proper system of institutionalised sexual grooming that only the State can provide - none of this freelance stuff provided by the taxi drivers and their ilk.  The days of the free-market capitalism such as Bertold Brecht gave us in the 'Three-penny Opera' must be ended and lets get back to a time when righteous men like Sir Cyril Smith ruled the roost:  let's nationalise 'sexual grooming under workers' control' and keep the spivs out.

The Historian Eric Hobsbawm dies!

ERIC HOBSBAWM, who according to one account became 'regarded as influential in the birth of New Labour', was a distinguished Marxist historian.  Tony Blair in 1998, made him a Companion of Honour.  His fellow historian, Niall Ferguson described his four volume historical coverage from 'The Age of Revolution' to 1994's 'The Age of Extremes', as 'the best starting point I know for anyone who wishes to begin studying modern history'.

He was certainly good at glossing, damage limitation and slipping off the hook of responsibility for the crimes committed in the name of Marx and Marxism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.  Hobsbawm remained in the British Communist Party all his life, even after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

In a relatively recent essay 'Marx Today' (see his book 'How to change the World'), written after a Jewish Book Week in 2007, Hobsbawm writes:  'One cannot say Marx died a failure in 1883, because his writings had begun to make an impact in Germany and especially among intellectuals in Russia, and a movement led by his disciples was already on the way to capturing the German labour movement.'  Then Eric Hobsbawm invites us:  'Walk into Highgate cemetery, where a nineteenth-century Marx and Spencer - Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer - are buried, curiously enough within sight of each other's grave' and he continues triumphantly to add, 'When both were alive, Herbert was the acknowledged Aristotle of the age, Karl a guy who lived on the lower slopes of Hampstead on his friend's money' and yet, 'Today nobody even knows Spencer is there, while elderly pilgrims from Japan and India visit Karl Marx's grave and exiled Iranian and Iraqi communists insist on being buried in his shade.' 

Without wishing to promote Herbert Spencer as a thinker of substance in the modern world, it is curious how Hobsbawm wants to portray Marx's grave almost as a shrine with tribes of pilgrims from far and wide worshiping at it.  Perhaps Hobsbawm was fixated on graves and the immortality of Karl Marx, because he himself was an old man when he wrote this late essay, and he wanted to reassure himself that his own life had not been in vain, and that 'the idea' would survive his own passing.  This anxiety is clearly profound where he writes that if you type Marx's name into Google 'he remains the largest of great intellectual presences, exceeded only by Darwin and Einstein, but well ahead of Adam Smith and Freud.'

It is this is an hierarchical view that the biggest is the best that did much to permeate and poison thinking in the 20th Century.  I suppose it had something to do with the influence of positivism on western thought:  positivism was based on the idea of Auguste Comte, the French philosopher, who called for a new social doctrine based on the natural sciences.  Crudely put, according to Comte's 'Religion of Humanity', mankind was developing out of darkness with the belief in magic being replaced by religion and thence onwards to the rationalist realm of secularism and science.  For Hobsbawm, the historian, the progress was social out of 'Primitive Rebels', through millenarian cults and anarchism, beyond the machine-breakers and Luddites of the early 19th Century to the Chartists, reaching parliamentary socialism, only to culminate, as we now know, with New Labour, and the preacher Ed Milliband going on this week at the Labour Party Conference about a 'One Nation' Britain.  This 'irresistable escalator' of progress is, in fact, not so different from the model proposed by Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx's neighbour lying in Highgate cemetery, who also had a view of Evolution as a principle of science that predicted the continued upward development of the human species.

Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, historian, born 9th, June 1917;  died 1st, October 2012.