10 2GM Friday July 31 2020 | the times
News
Councils are launching their own track
and trace operations amid renewed
concerns that the national system is
missing too many cases.
Sandwell council in the West Mid-
lands, where there are fears of a loom-
ing local lockdown, has launched a
system in an attempt to track cases.
Bradford council is also hoping to in-
stall its own local tracing system but has
been unable to implement it owing to a
lack of funding.
National contact-tracing chiefs are
promising to test 150,000 people with
no symptoms every day by September,
potentially allowing shorter quaran-
tines as well as hunting out the corona-
virus in hotspots.
A contact-tracing app will be ready in
time for winter, officials have promised,
with a pilot version due to launch within
weeks. An advertising blitz urging
people to get a test to help bring about
the return of normality was also
launched yesterday, with officials hop-
ing that the “let’s get tested” campaign
will lodge as deeply as the “stay at home”
message at the height of the pandemic.
Baroness Harding of Winscombe,
who leads the national test and trace
service, said that it was “a vital part of
enabling us to get back to safely doing
the normal things we love, and will be-
come ever more important as we ap-
proach winter”. A business plan pub-
lished yesterday envisages mobile test-
ing units being sent to places with
clusters within 12 hours and locating
the sources of outbreaks.
A fifth of people transferred to the
contact-tracing system are still ignor-
ing calls and Lady Harding is promising
to do more to make them engage and
give details of who they have seen.
About 73 per cent of those who were
reached provided details of their con-
Councils set
up their own
track and
trace systems
tacts within 24 hours in the week to July
22, down from 77 per cent the week
before, figures show.
Only 75 per cent of those contacts
were reached and told to isolate, down
from 78 per cent a week earlier. Reach-
ing them also took slightly longer, with
82 per cent of those contacted reached
within 24 hours, down from 84 per cent
the previous week.
Sandwell council claimed that the
government’s system was reaching on-
ly 60 per cent of cases locally and that
it had been forced to plug the gaps to
prevent the virus spreading further.
Susan Hinchcliffe, the leader of
Bradford council, said last night: “We’re
not alone in wanting to set up a local
track and trace system. Other local
authorities are calling for the same. We
are now in active dialogue with govern-
ment about how we can access the data
that the national team cannot trace.”
Ceredigion county council in the
west of Wales launched a tracing
system at the start of the lockdown in
March, while the Greater Manchester
combined authority, which represents
2.8 million people, has had a local trac-
ing system in place since May, which
works alongside the national system.
Sir Richard Leese, the region’s health
chief, has said that it is aimed at “com-
plex cases which can’t be dealt with
through a simple phone bank”.
According to official figures the rate
of infection in the week to July 26 stood
at 32.4 cases per 100,000 in Sandwell,
up from 23.2 previously.
Yesterday a McDonald’s restaurant
in the borough shut its doors after five
staff tested positive, while more than 50
people recently tested positive after an
outbreak at a factory.
Lisa McNally, the director of public
health at Sandwell, who has previously
said that the area is “halfway” to a lock-
down, told Sky News: “I wouldn’t quite
go as far as to say we’ve given up on test
and trace, but we’re not happy with just
allowing them to do their job any more.
I don’t see the urgency to fix this; I don’t
see them running around in a panic.”
She said that the council’s own
system would deliver “a lite version of
contact tracing” and aimed to find
people the government system had not
reached.
There have been particular concerns
in Smethwick, where Dr McNally said
there had been a problem in communi-
cating the need for test and trace to
those who do not speak English.
“As soon as the new case comes in
now we’re not waiting for test and trace
to fail to reach them, we’re phoning
them the same day,” she said. “We will
have a language speaker available for
them, immediately — if we find out
they only speak Punjabi, Urdu, Arabic
etc — so we can first of all give the
important messages that they need to
know.”
She added: “We’re having to deploy
resources that we don’t really have out
of other services to try and do it our-
selves. And essentially, the taxpayer’s
paying twice for this.”Neil Johnston Midlands Correspondent
Charlotte Wace Northern Correspondent
Chris Smyth Whitehall Editor
How many are traced?
People transferred to the contact tracing system (includes
complex and noncomplex cases) by whether they were
reached and asked to provide contact details, England
Source: Department of Health and Social CareJuly 9 to 15 July 16 to 22
People whose communication
details were not provided176 (4.5%)
122 (2.9%)
People who were not reached
582 (15.0%)
665 (15.7%)
People who were reached and
asked to provide details of recent
close contacts3,129 (80.5%)
3,455 (81.4%)
News Coronavirus
Portraits of health workers, including Identical twins Samar and Samah Aweis, by photographer Andy Scaysbrook and the
Most people in England do not have a
good grasp of the lockdown rules,
according to a survey that raises further
doubts over the government’s commu-
nications strategy.
Only 45 per cent of people in
England felt that they had a broad
understanding of what was expected of
them. Across the whole of the UK, less
than 30 per cent of adults under the age
of 30 said they were complying with the
rules completely, compared with about
60 per cent of those aged over 60.
The government has come under fire
from scientists for inconsistent and
confusing statements. Paul Hunter,
professor in medicine at the University
of East Anglia, said messages from min-
isters on issues such as facemasks had,
at times, left the public “confused as
hell”. It was a “crying shame” that a
single set of guidelines had not been
adopted across England, Wales, Scot-
land and Northern Ireland, he said.
The survey, which included 70,
people, shows how confusion has risen
as the lockdown has eased. During the
strictest period, when the governmentLockdown rules? Most
people don’t have a clue
issued a stark “stay at home” message,
about 90 per cent of adults across Brit-
ain were confident that they knew what
was expected of them.
Data collected in the past two weeks
shows that confidence levels in the rest
of the UK are higher than those in
England but have still fallen. In Scot-
land, 75 per cent of those surveyed said
that they broadly understood their
guidelines; in Wales it was 61 per cent.
Daisy Fancourt, an associate profes-
sor of psychobiology and epidemiology
at University College London, who led
the study, said levels of understanding
about what was permissible had
dropped among younger adults. “This
could reflect difficulties in applying the
rules to more complex life scenarios
among younger adults, or may be re-
flective of the different amounts of time
spent following the news on Covid-
among different age groups,” she said.
The survey also showed that access
to healthcare has fallen, with about
20 per cent of adults saying that they
had not told a GP about symptoms of an
illness when they usually would have
done, even when appointments to see a
doctor were available.Rhys Blakely Science Correspondent
Furloughed workers to
get full redundancy pay
Furloughed workers who lose their
jobs will receive redundancy pay
based on their normal wages rather
than the reduced furlough rate.
Under the furlough scheme the
government pays 80 per cent of a
worker’s salary but it is being wound
down from next month and stopped
completely in October. The
government said that throughout
the pandemic it has urged
businesses to pay those being made
redundant based on their normal
wage rather than their furlough pay.coronavirus in brief
Call to protect jobs of
the clinically vulnerable
A coalition of 15 charities has urged
the government to protect the jobs
of workers who have been
“shielding” when offices reopen.
They said that 595,000 “extremely
clinically vulnerable” workers have
been shielding and that financial
support should continue to be
provided for those who cannot work
from home or whose organisations
cannot make their workplace safe
enough for them to return.