Local lockdowns could see entire cities placed back under strict regulations, Matt Hancock has said. The Health Secretary said if there were to be a spike in the number of infections in a particular city, the Government’s starting point would be “to find a much more localised area within a part of a city”. Mr Hancock said the aim would be to spot the virus spread early on in order to “get quite a localised area of the outbreak”. “The focus is to get as early as possible, as local as possible, and things like tackling an outbreak in one hospital or in one very small area is what we’re really aiming at here,” Mr Hancock told The Andrew Marr show. Mr Hancock cited the closure of new admissions to a hospital in Western-super-Mare after it saw a spike in the number of infections as an example of how to control the spread of the virus. “We then put in place testing of Asymptomatic people in the community around the hospital and those connected to the hospital and we found that it hadn’t led to community spread because of the action that had been taken so they had to close.” He said as a result of “very significant infection control procedures in the hospital”, they were able to “deal with that local outbreak”. “That is a model of how we can do this elsewhere,” he said. It comes after Mr Hancock cautioned last week that regional lockdowns could be imminent. “We want to increasingly have an approach of tackling local lockdowns where we spot a flare-up,” he told the Downing Street daily press briefing when asked if there was a case for regional restrictions. “There is a challenge in the north-west of England to address, and to a lesser degree in the south-west of England. Both the north-west and the south-west are big areas themselves, and we need to get more granular and more focused and find the source of the local outbreak and then deal with it,” he said. Mr Hancock was keen to emphasise that the UK was “winning the battle” against coronavirus and that would enable the easing of some lockdown restrictions in England. “We are winning the battle against this disease and that allows us to release more of the restrictions – including putting in place this local action supported by the test and trace system,” he told Sky’s Sophy Ridge On Sunday. “But we’ve got to be cautious in our approach to it because the last thing anybody wants is for the virus to get going again and us to have to go right back to square one.”
