Calls to work together to beat Covid-19 in Scarborough Borough

Residents in Scarborough Borough and North Yorkshire have been called on to work together to ensure that there is not a Christmas lockdown.

Richard Webb director of Health and Adult Services at North Yorkshire County Council said that the county needed to pull together before the festive period, especially on the coast where infection rates remain high.

Mr Webb told a briefing of the North Yorkshire Local Resilience Forum (NYLFR) this morning that the public should show “resolution” to beat the virus.

He said:

“I saw a news report about Whitby and it showed Resolution, which was Captain Cook’s ship and I think what we need is resolution.

“Resolution and determination to keep to the rules, to reduce the spread of infection and give us the best chance for some kind of normal Christmas.

“What we want is a Christmas cracker rather than a Christmas lockdown.”

Mr Webb’s plea came the same day as North Yorkshire Police and Scarborough Borough Council teamed up to urge people to stay at home to reduce the spread of the virus on the coast.

In the last week, 40 fixed penalty notices for breaches of Covid regulations have been issued in the Scarborough borough alone, with just five in the rest of the county.

Twenty were issued to those who are outside of their homes without a reasonable excuse, 16 to people gathering outside and four to people gathering indoors.

Superintendent Mike Walker, lead for North Yorkshire Police’s Covid response said:

“If we do not take some serious action straight away, this situation is only going to get worse. More people will die of this virus and the lockdown may need to be extended or restrictions become even tighter, to curb the impact.”

Dr Lincoln Sargeant, North Yorkshire’s director of Public Health, told the NYLRF that the coast had seen an “exponential growth” in coronavirus infections stating that in one month Scarborough borough went from having just 11 cases a week to 572 cases a week.

At one point last week, Scarborough’s infection rate was second only to Hull for the highest across England.

On Monday, Whitby Town Council released a statement saying the local infection rate had been “climbing steadily since the massive influx of visitors at the end of October”.

Dr Sargeant said that there had been “no evidence” found to support this claim.

He said:

“We can’t find any information that points the finger definitely at visitors.

“Clearly, if you have people travelling in from higher areas of infection and interacting with locals there is always the possibility that you will get a few cases that way.

“But what we found when we looked at all the new cases was that only about half of them had any link to a particular setting, there was only a small number linked to leisure or tourism venues. Even in those ones we were finding it was predominately staff who had household contacts who were infected.

“We haven’t found evidence across the county of customers in our hotels or leisure settings who have been infected in that contact. I’m not saying that it can’t have happened just that we see no evidence of it in the investigations that we have done.”

The number of Covid-19 patients in Scarborough Hospital has increased by 13 in the last seven days, the meeting was told, with the figure now standing at 62.