By Professor Dominic Harrison Director of Public Health, Blackburn with Darwen Council

IN July, Blackburn with Darwen was one of the first Local Authority areas after Leicester to bring in localised special measures to control Covid-19 spread.

Since then, we have gone through a series of reviews with central government and the most recent special measures agreed have resulted in eight wards in and nine wards out of new measures.

These measures are unlikely to be changed before September 20.

It has taken Leicester more than six weeks to get down from a rate of about 137 per 100,000 to an overall rate of 28.6 per 100,000.

They still have many special measures in place.

It seems unlikely that all of the Blackburn with Darwen wards will either be down to the national average rate of confirmed cases of Covid-19 (currently at 12.1 per 100,000), or below the national ‘threshold of interest’ (somewhere between 20 and 25 cases per 100,000) by September 20.

At the point we entered the current arrangements, the overall rate in the eight wards was at about 105 per 100,000 and in the overall nine non-intervention ward areas across the borough, it was 13 per 100,000.

This difference is why we had to bring in hyperlocal measures.

These rates have now come down to 74.7 per 100,000 in the eight intervention wards and risen slightly in the nine wards to 19.6 per 100,000.

This rise in the non-intervention wards in Blackburn with Darwen is mirroring rises in other local authority areas in the North West who have not had special measures in place.

It also mirrors rises in other European countries where lockdowns were lifted and who now have only minimal Covid-19 measures in place.

If we continue to target the social control measures we have in place across the eight wards, improve on the national contact tracing system performance by doing more of it locally, and step up our capacity to do community testing street by street, then we stand a good chance of getting to where Leicester is now more rapidly – and eventually exiting special measures.

We are learning about what works as we go and the path through this pandemic is uncertain.

If you want to know long will it take to get Blackburn with Darwen out of the special measures the only really accurate answer is going to have to be ‘as long as it takes’.

But we are making progress.