Bangor ‘under active watch’ to see whether local lockdown is needed

Bangor is under “active watch” to see whether a local lockdown will be needed, according to Wales’ Chief Medical Officer.

Dr. Frank Atherton said that an incident management team had been formed within the Gwynedd local authority area that was providing updates to the Welsh Government.

However, he said that where the Covid-19 outbreak was restricted to a particular community it was easier to bring under control without a lockdown.

He also defended the use of county-wide lockdowns rather than the “hyper-local” lockdowns called for by the Welsh Conservatives and Plaid Cymru.

“Local authorities seem to be the right democratic boundary to use for decision making,” he said.

“We have introduced a local lockdown in Llanelli so don’t rule that out in future. But we have to take the circumstances of transmission not just numbers into account.”

 

‘Live with it’

He added that it would potentially be a “difficult winter” for Wales.

He said the country had moved from having “very low” levels of Covid-19 to a “resurgence of viral transmission”. There was an increase in people being admitted to hospital and ICU, he said.

There was however evidence that the local lockdowns were working, he said, including a big fall in the number of new cases in Blaenau Gwent.

He said that he was not ruling out a change to restrictions but that there were no plans for one at the moment.

“It’s going to be with us for some time, and we’re going to have to learn to live with it while we wait for and hope for a vaccine to become available,” he said.