Cumbria’s director of public health has urged people to rethink their Christmas plans – but only if it involves “hundreds of people getting together from a wide variety of places”.
Colin Cox was taking part in a live question-and-answer session about COVID-19 and was asked whether people should be changing their plans in light of the emergence of the new Omicron variant.
Mr Cox confirmed that Cumbria expects to have 100 cases a day by Friday and at that rate it could be “easily” 600 cases a day by Christmas.
That would represent the type of peak seen in the Alpha wave in January and the Delta variant in July, he said.
But he also conceded it was a contradiction telling people to avoid gathering in large public groups but then not asking them to cancel their festive plans.
“Let’s be very frank, there is a contradiction there,” he said. “But if you tell people to stop doing this, what you are effectively doing is destroying your tourist industry in Cumbria at the very time that it is, potentially, making some of the money it needs to survive for the year.
“This is the Government trying to take a very, very fine balancing act between doing what it can to mitigate against the spread of COVID – recognising it cannot stop this completely as that is out of the window.
“All we can do is try to slow it down to give more time to get jabs into arms and try to do that while trying to do as little damage to the economy as possible.
“Now, have we got that balance right at risk point? I think only time will tell.”
His advice to people was to get a booster jab and said he intended to see his own family but with precautions in place.
Mr Cox said: “If what you’ve got is a relatively small number of family from a relatively small number of households getting together, if they are vaccinated and particularly if they are boosted, and if you make sure you do get people tested beforehand so you can try to screen out people who are actually COVID-positive, I think people should be able to have a Christmas this year in a way that was much more difficult last year.”
Asked whether he believed the UK was heading for another lockdown, Mr Cox said he did not know but would “never say never.”
“I think what we can see is that there is no great appetite for lockdown at a national level and certainly not with the way the Government is moving on this, but, however, I would certainly never say never on it. We still don’t know enough about Omicron,” said Mr Cox.
“If your Christmas plan involves hundreds of people getting together from a very wide variety of places, then yes, I would probably be thinking very seriously about that.”
The first case of Omicron in Cumbria was detected on November 30, he said, and since then there had been more than 100 “probable or confirmed” cases identified.
“The rate of cases is doubling every two-and-a-half days or so.”
More than 150 people watched the event on Cumbria County Council’s Facebook page with close to 200 people asking questions and making comments.
