UK coronavirus live officials tackling more than 100 outbreaks a week, says Hancock
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Global coronavirus live: latest updates
8.14am BST
The continuing city-wide lockdown of Leicester is “not justified,” its mayor Sir Peter Soulsby has said, after he was provided with government data that apparently shows the outbreak is only in a “couple of areas of the city”.
Soulsby told BBC Breakfast that, having “finally” been provided with “useful data”, they know that around 10% of the city has recorded a higher transmission of the virus.
“If we had known that weeks ago we could’ve actually dealt with it at that time and prevented this lockdown.
It’s very clear when you look at the data that it’s a couple of areas of the city that have got a higher than the average transmission of the virus, and certainly the way in which the city has been locked down in its entirety, and indeed beyond our boundary, is not justified.”
“I mean even the data we’re getting now is the best part of two weeks’ out of date, and we need to be knowing, on a day-by-day basis street-by-street basis, what that data is telling us and then we can tell whether or not, in those particular neighbourhoods, we’re actually combating the virus effectively.
“We need to know the ethnicity of the people who are being tested, we need to know where they are working. There’s been all this talk about perhaps it’s passed on in factories, but we have no way of knowing that.”
8.06am BST
The justice secretary, Robert Buckland, has said he welcomes the National Crime Agency investigation into alleged worker exploitation in Leicester, where there are concerns that conditions inside some of the city’s sweatshops were factor in the local surge in coronavirus cases.
Buckland told Sky News:
“A light has now been shone on an appalling litany of abuse and I’m glad to hear that the National Crime Agency (NCA) is now conducting an investigation, its got a lot of power to bring in various agencies to start the work of an investigation into this.” Continue reading...
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