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Oadby and Wigston have become the second worst coronavirus hot spot in the UK, and the people who live there are concerned and disappointed.
Now it is possible that new restrictions will be introduced in the district after it became known yesterday that the number of people infected with Covid-19 was equivalent to 115 per 100,000.
That compares with the overall UK rate of 32.8 per 100,000 and puts Leicestershire municipality worse than anywhere but Bolton. The parliamentarian of the zone, Neil O’Brien, said today that a toughening was “very probable”.
Anne Bailey, 80, was concerned about contracting the disease, especially if the winter caused a large increase in cases, as some people hope.
She said: “I am very surprised and very disappointed to know.
“It’s a lovely, peaceful place to live, so it’s strange that half the people here don’t obey the rules.
“It is not a dense population, so I would have expected Oadby and Wigston to do better.
“Many of us are trying to do our part to keep everyone safe, but some people are not.
“Meanwhile, the government and the hospitals can only do what they think is right, but we’ve never had this before and that’s the problem.
“So far I’ve been lucky not to get it, but winter is coming, so who knows?”
Oadby resident Mandeep Kaur, 34, said measures to combat the virus were not working.
She said: “I think maybe not all the people here have social distancing and not all of them follow the rules.
“However, I am surprised that it is so tall.
“And people can’t get tested either. One of my colleagues said they tried to get a test kit, but there weren’t many available. “
Andy and Claire McManus, who run a downtown vaping shop, felt too many people were breaking the rules.
Andy said, “It’s people who congregate in their gardens with a lot of people, who have big family gatherings and there was a restaurant here that had 250 people at a wedding, which was illegal.”
Claire said: “It doesn’t help when the track and trace system is down.
“There were 17 positive cases on Saturday, all from the same place, but I know other people who were also there and who have not yet been tested or have not even been contacted.”
The high infection rate is also bad for business. Andy said: “It’s not great for us. We closed for four months, then we got an additional six weeks of closure and no help.
“People are not dating, so we are fighting.”
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Local Congressman Neil O’Brien said on Twitter this morning that the huge increase in cases there and the fact that the district has the second highest rate in the country is “very concerning” and predicted further restrictions.
He said: “It seems very likely that there will be some kind of tightening of the measures to try to get things under control.
“I am going to defend that any intervention is as focused and non-disruptive as possible.
“The truth is that something will have to be done if we want to prevent an extremely alarming trend from becoming a very dangerous situation at the local level.”
Leicestershire County Council Public Health Director Mike Sandys has said this was the first time the municipality had been in a worse situation than Leicester, which has been among the hot spots since the beginning of the summer, when became the first place to have its own local lockdown.
Sandys said: “Rates at Oadby and Wigston quadrupled over the course of five days. It’s unprecedented, there were a few days at the close where it was in the top ten, but this is the first time a Leicestershire district has passed over the city of Leicester. Number two in the country is not a good place to be.
“That has something to do with the numbers here because we are not talking about a population the same size as somewhere like Bolton, but we are still talking about 50-60 cases in five days and that’s a lot. It’s a red alert for me. “
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