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Rees expects Bristol to remain in tier 3
Marvin Rees expects that the government will keep Bristol in tier 3 when it makes its announcement on Thursday.
Rees said he thought prime minister Boris Johnson would keep all tier 3 areas under the tightest restrictions as a trade-off for loosening the rules over Christmas.
Health secretary Matt Hancock is expected to announce the government’s tier review decisions on Wednesday but Bristol will not find out until Thursday morning which tier it will find itself in from Saturday.
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Speaking during a Facebook Live on Wednesday evening, Rees said: “We do expect to be in tier 3 tomorrow, despite our huge reduction in (Covid-19) cases.
“We’d hoped to earn our way into tier 2, but we suspect government will keep all areas in tier 3 that are in tier 3.
“My sense is that the pressure currently on the prime minister to think again about the loosening of restrictions over Christmas will be resisted by the PM, but the counter to it will be keeping us in tier 3 so that the base (number) of cases going into the Christmas loosening of restrictions will be as low as possible.”
Rees said that this is so that “when there is a blowback on what’s happened over Christmas, as there will be because people will be interacting more, when there is an uptick in cases it will not be as bad as it potentially could have been if we’d gone into tier 2, had more interactions and then loosened the restrictions as well”.
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Rees added that Bristol City Council would continue to lobby government for the financial support necessary to enable the local authority and city businesses to survive whatever level of restrictions it finds itself in.
He said that as at 4pm on Tuesday, Bristol’s rate of coronavirus cases per 100,000 people was 115.
This was much lower than the national average of 173 and lower than the rates in South Gloucestershire and North Somerset, with 148 and 122 cases per 100,000 people, respectively.
However, it was higher than the rate in Bath & North East Somerset, which had 95 cases per 100,000.
The R-rate for the South West is currently between 0.8 and 1, meaning that every ten people infected with the virus will spread it to between eight and ten other people.
Main photo: Facebook
Amanda Cameron is a local democracy reporter for Bristol
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