I spoke to Heather Lewis who's a public health consultant working for Public Health Wales leads a specialist team in the Cwm Taf area which monitors and informs public health decisions on managing the virus there.
She helped inform the local lockdown we saw there in the autumn. She laid out a few reasons why RCT has been so unable to shake off high levels of community transmission.
These include:
- Mobility -
Car ownership is much lower in RCT than other places.
As people are more reliant on public transport which opens up more lines of transmission. Especially elderly people are reliant on others giving them a lift to get to places like a doctor's appointment.
This mixing of vulnerable people with those who may well be asymptomatic is another way the virus can spread.
This inability to travel also poses an issue for healthcare planners with regard to testing.
If people are not able to travel far, they may be unable to get a test (you wouldn’t want people with symptoms hopping on the bus).
This means it is harder to get a handle on just how much Covid there is in the area.
- Employment -
People in RCT are more likely to be in roles which require face to face interaction with others.
Carers, supermarket workers, manual labourers - all those professions that we gladly clapped for months because the pandemic showed us just how essential they are.
But it is the nature of these roles that you are more likely to catch Covid as you have more face to face contact with people.
Added to this you have the fact these jobs are, in the main, not well paid and often insecure, which leads to people feeling they cannot miss work.
- Family ties -
This is a big one and in part ties into the employment side.
With lower incomes childcare is less affordable and jobs are less likely to be done from home.
This means a reliance on grandparents and other relatives. This increases lines of transmission.
Plus, the lockdown necessitated a bigger behavior change in the Valleys than Cardiff for example.
Often in the some Valley community there are multiple families living on one street.
I live in Cardiff & know no one on my street and never go in their house. My behaviour didn't have to change.
If my mum lived on my street the transition would've been a harder one to make in terms of the change to day to day life.
- Housing -
Even if you had 100% compliance with the rules, the nature of much of the housing in the area means the virus easily spread.
Smaller houses mean it's harder to isolate and social distance.
It also makes the lockdown harder to endure, esp when you can't leave home.
Even if all these other factors that help the virus spread were not in place, RCT would still likely have more deaths than average.
All those underlying health conditions like heart disease, obesity, diabetes and stroke are above average in the Valleys.
This is just a snap shot. You can read the full analysis here:
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/w...death-19776398