Covid tiers future: Harrogate sees rise in latest estimated Covid figures

Did lockdown work in Harrogate? The Covid case rates at the start and end of November

Currently lying in Tier 2 - or High Tier - of the Government's coronavirus restrictions on behaviour and business as part of North Yorkshire, Harrogate's hopes of being eased into the gentler Tier 1 rest on how the the county as a whole fares in its battle with the pandemic.

But in the latest data released as part of a Covid Symptoms Study being run by health science company ZOE, show a rise of 432 in estimated Covid cases in Harrogate.

The data, which is shared with Kings College London and the NHS and is frequently quoted on the news, puts the current total number of estimated cases in Harrogate at 966.

That is still better than at the start of the second lockdown when the same data estimated the total in Harrogate as 1,864 cases.

Pressure has being growing on the Government to consider rearranging the tiers to reflect the more localised picture in districts, rather than being based on the broad sweep of county or region-wide statistics.

Tier allocations are to be reviewed by the Government every two weeks, meaning Harrogate will find out on December 16 whether its tier will change.

The current system has proven to be particularly harsh on areas such as Pateley Bridge and Nidd Valley, which was also placed in Tier 2 along with the rest of North Yorkshir last week despite recording zero new cases of coronavirus.

Lockdown was introduced for the second time across England on November 5 in an attempt to curb a surge of infections which started at the end of summer and gathered pace in autumn.

Harrogate saw a big drop in cases, as a result, with the infection rate shrinking three-fold between these two time periods from 277 cases per 100,000 people to 85.

But it is believed that infection rates would need to be below 50 cases per 100,000 to allow any move into Tier 1 or Medium Tier.

Last Wednesday, December 2, saw Harrogate entering Tier 2 local coronavirus restrictions which place curbs on household mixing and pub-going, the same as the vast majority of the country.

Richard Webb, North Yorkshire County Council’s corporate director for Health and Social Care, says the hard work to keep rates down had to continue.

He said: “ We need to continue to work really hard to stay at ‘Tier 2’ and hopefully reduce in due course to ‘Tier 1’. The advice we are getting is that it might be quite a long journey to get out of ‘Tier 2’ into ‘Tier 1’.”

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