Why is the North of England and Glasgow worse than London?

[ssd]

I think this thing travels north, so hopefully London is doing better than us up here as its maybe swept through London and is wrecking havoc up here now.

Or is that too simplistic?

[quote Rosehip10]@doadeer But Richmond now has the highest rate in London and this is the definition of a middle class borough?[/quote]
Ah I didn't know that 🙈 I think everything I said is totally incorrect.

I thinks it's airports and foreign travel. This imo should be banned to all unless Extreme circumstances until it's under control

Feb ........

Huge numbers of London school kids sking and Home Counties too.
Families sking is extremely common where I live.

Huge numbers of tourists coming into London airports plus business travel.

This has pretty much stopped. Heathrow is a dead zone

However cheap holiday deals from the smaller airports Luton Manchester Liverpool have spread the early seeds in summer and towards the end of summer weather changed here so more people went inside to meet Low level spread begins.

Schools go back and spread increases add the unis to mix and bang!! I expect it to kick off again after Oct half term too.

London is deserted? Also does anyone else think the English media is really weird about excessive hammering the difference to south of the country?

Me! It's so annoying. You can't just put one borough under local lockdown, you'd have to shut the whole city which is quite a different proposition.

I mean Sadiq seems to be positively in favour of a lockdown unlike the Northern mayors.

London cases appear to be rising more quickly than nearly every other region on the latest figures - just from a lower base

I suspect that as soon as people started working from home in London, the draw of the big ‘city centres’ in London - Covent Garden, Leicester Square, oxford street etc just evaporated. It’s such a faff to get to these places that unless you’ve already commuted in, why would you bother. You’d never eg ‘go home first’ to get ready before going out.

I suspect there is a much more ‘standalone’ nightlife and club culture in cities eg Manchester, Leeds, Cardiff etc, so that even if people are no longer going to the office, they still go ‘out’.

I think Kistanbul's comments are very astute. I've barely been into central London since April. And I don't even travel around my whole borough, just my neighbourhood, which has a population of about 10,000. I shop, work and socialise - outdoors - here and I don't think I'm unusual.

The Richmond rates though are apparently linked to Uni students who have a Richmond GP as their address but are testing positive elsewhere.

The apparent spike in Glasgow is primarily because of the number of students arriving in Sept. Glasgow has around 40,000 students and most live in purpose built student flats, sharing with 4 or 5 others. The first few weeks basically started a chain reaction of hundreds of cases. The other big factor in Glasgow is the crap weather meaning people spend more time indoors and the fact that relatively less of Scottish businesses fully opened up pushed people into socialising via house parties where people naturally let down their guard more than in a public space. Glasgow city centre also has a very high proportion of flats with shared stairwells and no private gardens so harder to truly self isolate

I think some of it is due to the fact that when we first went into lockdown, figures in the South were at peak level, but the North never got to that stage. I think the high numbers we’re seeing here in the North now are actually the first proper wave up here, rather than the second.

I think the original lockdown was too early, especially for the north. In the SE, even if we didn't personally know victims we were hearing horror stories from people we knew who worked in the hospitals.

Further North it didn't get a grip like it did in London so people didn't take it so seriously and spent very many weeks locked down for no real reason. It seems in the North people just aren't taking the rules as seriously, which you can understand because they don't have first hand experience of why they should.

I live in London and have relatives all over the north... In London at the beginning it felt like we knew a vast number of people with symptoms but in March no one was being tested....but literally no one we knew in the north seemed to know anyone who thought they had it.or had symptoms ..I am convinced London has an element of herd immunity

Vast swathes of London is empty. Very many people employed in London don't live there and have been working from home since early March. Many companies don't have plans to return to the office until next year, if at all.

Is that the case in Northern cities?

I think the big rises in cases in both Glasgow and Edinburgh came with the students. If you look at the plot of no of cases vs date you see a rather dramatic jump after the 20th September from 20ish infections to 140 in Edinburgh and 60ish to 250ish in Glasgow. Also there were a lot of reports of big outbreaks in halls.

It's sad since cases were low even with schools back in mid August. We might have been able to live 'normally' for a few more months if uni had been virtual for the first term ☹

Also in London a lot of tests were relocated to the hotspots elsewhere. It's only been the last week or so that they have become available again-my facebook was filled with parents asking how to get a test. The ones local to me only had an allocation of 60 per day which meant by 10.30 am they were out. Also a neighbour is having a major heart op in one of the big hospitals here-they phoned her to say they were out of covid tests and she had to find one herself. So I expect the numbers will be huge in London if tests were available.

[quote Rosehip10]@doadeer But Richmond now has the highest rate in London and this is the definition of a middle class borough?[/quote]
Richmond's close proximity to Heathrow airport might explain the figures.

@Pelleas

On radio 4 last week the reasons given ref the north were larger households smaller homes and more people in customer facing jobs. I dont know why in Glasgow though.

I'm not sure I'd agree with this R4 perspective. I don't think the north has 'smaller homes' than somewhere like London - for the price of a decent detached house in many parts of the north, you'd only get a tiny flat in London. And are there really fewer people in customer-facing jobs in London? Think of London's plethora of shops, pubs, restaurants and hotels, the capacity it has for tourists who use service industries.

You're right. London has some of the most high density overcrowded cramped housing in the whole country. More rough sleepers than anywhere else, and thousands of families sharing one room (sometimes for several years). I'll try to find an article about Newham I posted a while back on a different thread.

Mixed amongst the wealth is a huge amount of deprivation. The rich tend to live only part-time or temporarily in London - with their permanent homes being in the shires.

Nine million people live in London. Many many of them can't work from home. Doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, social carers, shop, bar, pub, restaurant, and pharmacy workers, delivery drivers, transport workers, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, and more. More affluent white collar workers often don't notice these people travelling to and from work because they're less likely to work traditional 9-5 shifts.

@Rushjob

Targeted testing

This.

@nancypineapple

Also in London a lot of tests were relocated to the hotspots elsewhere. It's only been the last week or so that they have become available again-my facebook was filled with parents asking how to get a test. The ones local to me only had an allocation of 60 per day which meant by 10.30 am they were out. Also a neighbour is having a major heart op in one of the big hospitals here-they phoned her to say they were out of covid tests and she had to find one herself. So I expect the numbers will be huge in London if tests were available.

Yes this.

London is a Virus's wet dream. Millions of people - many living in very close proximity to each other.

Watch this space. It's deja vu when it comes to London. Mayor Sadiq Khan knows this but has been largely ignored by the government. A previous poster's claim of a 'London centric' approach is utterly bizarre...(what, continuing daily direct flights from Wuhan to London long after the situation was clear?). So far over 6,200 Londoners have died.

The real issue is unnecessary division - stoked partly by a mischievous media. It's extremely unhelpful for everyone. A diversion tactic, when what we really need is a coherent national approach (with local input). Confusing different rules for every part of the country is not working. It breeds resentment, division, and confusion. People live and work across regions - and viruses don't respect local land boundaries.

i agree, it is the availability of testing.

The numbers are higher in the north for now, give it time and it’ll be everywhere again. I don’t think there is anything near herd immunity anywhere in London or elsewhere.

Virus aside, I thought all cities were collections of ‘villages’. I live in a city outside the U.K. and have not been to the city centre for months. My family live in the north east of England and experience the same.

But Richmond now has the highest rate in London and this is the definition of a middle class borough?

Isn’t people there just rich? I don’t think they have much in common with the typical middle class person in Britain.

Because London I believe had its second wave when everywhere else had its first as it’s been around since Christmas that’s my theory anyway

@newstart1234

The numbers are higher in the north for now, give it time and it’ll be everywhere again. I don’t think there is anything near herd immunity anywhere in London or elsewhere.

Virus aside, I thought all cities were collections of ‘villages’. I live in a city outside the U.K. and have not been to the city centre for months. My family live in the north east of England and experience the same.

Yep, I live in Greater Manchester and we certainly don’t have to go into the city centre for shopping! The centre of Manchester was deserted like the middle of London in the lockdown.

@notevenat20

But Richmond now has the highest rate in London and this is the definition of a middle class borough?

Isn’t people there just rich? I don’t think they have much in common with the typical middle class person in Britain.

The people of Richmond would be devastated to hear you describe them as middle class. It is an incredibly wealthy place with no university or halls. It’s interesting it’s them that have such a high rate atm.