Those suggesting slow vaccine uptake is driving Bolton etc, this is what the spectator had to say today:
“All eyes in the past few days have been on Bolton, the epicentre of the Indian variant in Britain, with 47 cases so far recorded there. It isn’t just the Indian B1.617.2 variant that is active there – in all, 473 new cases of Covid-19 have been recorded there in the past seven days. That equates to a rate of 164 per 100,000 and an increase of 97 per cent on the previous week. Some inner-city areas with high ethnic minority populations have recorded low take-up rates of the vaccine, but this does not appear to be the case with Bolton – by 18 April, three weeks after all over-fifties had been offered a first dose, 95 per cent of them had been inoculated.
The second hotspot of B1.617.2 is neighbouring Blackburn, with 19 cases. In Blackburn, too, there has been a surge of infections in recent days, with 150 cases, or 100.2 per 100,000, an increase of 87 per cent over the week. There, 94 per cent of the over-fifties had taken up the offer of a vaccine.
In Bedford, where there have been ten cases of B1.617.2, cases are up 88.6 per cent over the week and are running at 72.7 per 100,000. There, 95 per cent of the over-fifties have taken up the vaccine.
There are districts with far lower take-up – most notably in Central London. In Westminster, by 18 April just 67 per cent of over-fifties had had the jab. Cases have been running at just 26 per 100,000 over the past week, an increase of just 1.5 per cent over the past seven days.”