Derbyshire should remain in tier three, says county health chief

Drawing on his and his team’s expertise, Mr Wallace said Derbyshire should remain in tier three until at least mid-January, meaning restaurants and pubs will be limited to providing takeaways and businesses such as cinemas, hotels and bowling alleys would remain closed.

Mr Wallace believes it is important to see the impact of socialising at Christmas and new year before restrictions can be relaxed.

A decision on which tier Derby and Derbyshire will be in is due to be announced today (Wednesday).

Mr Wallace said: “From a pure health and wellbeing perspective, as a county over the last seven days, compared to the previous seven, we have seen a 20 per cent increase in the infection rate per 100,000 of the population.

“That is affecting different parts of the county differently and we know the NHS is still under pressure and particularly in intensive care and other parts of the system.

"So my view is that we stay at tier three.

“There are other views and perfectly legitimate arguments from other perspectives.

"But if I am purely doing my job, which is to advocate for the health of the population – and people probably won’t like it in some quarters – but my position is that we should stay as we are and review in January.

“You wouldn’t expect to come out of a national lockdown and see the rates increasing as fast as they are, it has been quite a big jump when previously we have either been flat-lining or decreasing or seeing a slight increase.

“Having that increase now is slightly concerning, given where we are, and unfortunately, the virus isn’t going to take a break for Christmas.”

Asked when the county could expect this change, Mr Wallace said: “It depends what the picture is looking like towards the back end of January.

"I’m not all for shutting hospitality and saying that tier three restrictions are brilliant.

“With the restrictions we have now we are going the wrong way and it worries me from a public health perspective.

“It gets portrayed that we are this nanny state that wants to tell people what to do.

"But it is absolutely coming from a place that this virus will cause lots of damage to people’s health and wellbeing and some people will not survive it.

"Our way of dealing with it, right now, is to carry on doing what we are doing.

“We need the level of restrictions that helps us do that because we have shown we can’t do it without.”

Mr Wallace said that people are ‘always looking for the quick fix’ but says this is not possible with Covid-19.

He said that the vaccine will not have a substantial impact until spring if there is a good amount of uptake of it.

He added that the best way to get down the tiers was to continue social distancing as a base requirement, coupled with a face covering and good hand hygiene.

Alongside this, he said people must self-isolate if told to do so and that if community testing is offered to them, they should take it up.