Northumberland 'must shout louder' over testing needs as chiefs say county losing out to other areas

Following her stark warning about the ‘exponential increase’ in cases in Northumberland at the Wednesday, September 23, full council meeting, Liz Morgan, the director of public health, was asked about the capacity of labs to process tests.

“What we’ve realised is that it seems that the areas which shout loudest get the lab capacity and despite the fact that the North East voluntarily adopted some local restrictions, we still feel some of that testing capacity nationally is being diverted to the North West and West Yorkshire,” she replied.

“I think because we were quite successful at influencing the Secretary of State over the issue of informal childcare, we want to be as vocal about re-prioritising testing capacity to the North East.

“From our perspective, that lack of testing capacity is undermining the ability of all local authorities to implement their control plans.

“We will be looking at how we can lobby the Government to make sure that testing capacity is re-prioritised to the North East.”

Earlier in the meeting, she said: “We have made a bit of progress in terms of testing, we now have one local testing site which is up and running in Ashington and another one which is being built in Blyth as we speak.

“We have worked with the community to address their concerns around lighting and noise, and hopefully the benefit of having an accessible testing site in their community will outweigh any inconvenience.”

Cllr Wayne Daley, who represents Cramlington North, also called for a testing centre in his town – with the data showing that the Cramlington Village ward had the most positive cases in Northumberland in the last seven days.

In response to a question from Alnwick’s ward member, Cllr Gordon Castle, Ms Morgan reiterated that while it may have been expected, there is nothing to suggest that the increase in Covid-19 cases is related to visitors and tourists coming to the county over the summer.

“Looking at the individual cases we’ve got, we don’t really have any evidence they are related to tourism, most of them are related to households mixing and socialising in younger age groups,” she said.

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