The single most important action we can all take, in fighting coronavirus, is to stay at home in order to protect the NHS and save lives. When we reduce our day-to-day contact with other people, we will reduce the spread of the infection. That is why the government has introduced these three measures:

1. Requiring people to stay at home, except for very limited purposes.
2. Closing certain businesses and venues.
3. Stopping all gatherings of more than two people in public.

Every person in the UK must comply with these new measures, which came into effect on Monday 23 March. The relevant authorities, including the police, have been given the powers to enforce them – including through fines and dispersing gatherings.

The government will look again at these measures every three weeks, and relax them if the evidence shows this is possible.

This advice is still current and is in place to reduce our day to day contact with people and reduce the rate of transmission. It is not acceptable at the moment for gatherings such as those noted in the email to take place even if they were staying 2m apart (i.e. maintain social distancing).

Full details can be found online.

It seems that a disproportionate number of people from ethnic minority backgrounds, particularly those in frontline services (such as domicillary care workers, taxi drivers and bus drivers) have been more susceptible to Covid-19. If this is the case, what measures have we taken so far and what additional steps will be taking to ensure these people are better protected and supported?

Ensuring adequate PPE for all staff is essential. We are supporting colleagues in identifying PPE needs and the whole system is working on this issue as a priority. All services in Gloucestershire are following the national guidance on PPE and are responsive to the frequent updates to this guidance that take place.

There is more information available online here.

In line with national guidance staff testing is being increased, and is available to symptomatic staff and symptomatic family members. It is hard to determine if some groups, for example BAME communities, are more at risk as overall the total number of cases at the Gloucestershire level is too small to be able to understand this.

If we were to see such a trend there may be other factors that might explain this, such as BAME communities being more likely to have lower socioeconomic status, or predisposition to other health conditions, and this is why this analysis needs to be done on a larger number of cases.

The Office for National Statistics has started to review this from the death certification data it receives. We have explored whether we can collect some more information locally but it would involve introducing a new recording system for our Registrations team. However, as the team are currently working hard to adapt to new ways of working due to the pandemic, we have not proceeded with this so far. The measures we have in place such as social distancing, shielding and the community hubs are designed to protect more vulnerable individuals from contracting COVID-19.