As the prime minister ponders over new lockdown measures especially during Christmas to contain the spread of coronavirus, it has emerged that Leicester may continue to remain under strict coronavirus restrictions. The city's mayor, Sir Peter Soulsby believes that currently there is “little prospect of release before the one-year anniversary” and that the city may continue to live under lockdown measures until early March in all likelihood.
Leicester is likely to spend the first fortnight after the second national lockdown again. Leicester has been living under lockdown since March 23, making it the only city in the country that has spent every day in lockdown since Boris Johnson announced the first national lockdown under some limitations.
In his interview with the LeicestershireLive, he said, "We've already had two thirds of a year with restrictions in place, it's hard to see how it won't go the full year. We made a huge effort with testing and it worked, but lockdown wasn’t lifted. It is something we would like to do again, it’s something that would allow us to do the same as Liverpool and drive rates right back down, but we can’t do it without the government’s support.
“If the government would tell us who has tested positive, give us that information, we could be tracking and tracing people and reducing the spread. It is that simple. All it would take was for them to copy us into an email. Tell us who the people who have tested positive are at the same time the national test and trace people and we can set about finding them and instructing them to isolate.”
Leicester has been issued with mass testing kits, but not the bar codes that allow them to be used, so instead of swabbing getting started, the kits remain in storage.
