Leicester’s mayor Sir Peter Soulsby has berated the UK government for handling his city’s COVID-19 full-fledged lockdown, which he claimed was not properly imposed.
In an interview with the BBC on Monday, Soulsby said that about ten percent of Leicester’s neighbourhoods "have a higher transmission of the [virus]", and that the data should have been shared earlier so that the authorities could concentrate on "preventing the transmission there".
According to him, it had taken "weeks" to "finally get some useful data" from the government on the coronavirus spikes.
He insisted that if local authorities had “known that weeks ago, we could’ve actually dealt with it at the time and prevented this lockdown”.
"It's very clear when you look at the data it's a couple of areas of the city that have got a higher than average transmission of the virus. Certainly, the way the city's been locked down in its entirety, and even beyond its boundaries, is not justified”, the Leicester mayor asserted.
He added that it was clear from last week’s discussions with the UK Department of Health and Social Care that “they haven’t yet got a clue how on earth they’re going to measure what constitutes success in this [COVID-19 lockdown]”.
Hancock argued that these outbreaks were being “swiftly and silently” dealt with, adding that the increase in testing capacity indicates that officials can take a more focused approach, avoiding the need to introduce nationwide measures.
Leicester became the first city in Britain to have COVID-19 restrictions reimposed, which came amid the government’s efforts to ease a national coronavirus lockdown on a step-by-step basis. Britain’s death toll from the disease currently stands at 44, 798, the third-largest after the US and Brazil, according to the World Health Organisation's latest situation report.