England's Covid-19 frontlines: the race to prevent local lockdowns

At the end of last week, the race was on. Blackburn with Darwen council was identified as an area of “concern” by Public Health England. With the number of infections rising,an emergency meeting of the Local Resilience Forum, which brings together NHS, councils across Lancashire, emergency services and other agencies, was called last Thursday to devise a plan. After the meeting, Blackburn’s public health director, Profe Dominic Harrison, told the Guardian he was determined to stop the outbreak without resorting to a Leicester-style lockdown. “A lockdown of the whole borough would be entirely inappropriate and wouldn’t be a solution to the problem we’ve got,” he said.