Why Corby’s tight-knit family ties may have caused its soaring Covid rates

As Corby’s coronavirus rates grew again over the weekend, health chiefs began looking at how to halt the spread of the virus in our town.

Corby was singled out for concern at last week’s government gold command meeting and last night, it was revealed that the town now had a seven-day rate of 1,106 in 100,000 people, with nearly 800 infections recorded since last Saturday.

It has prompted council leader Tom Beattie to ask the government to close all non-essential factories.The Northants Telegraph asked Northamptonshire Director of Public Health Lucy Wightman what had happened in Corby over Christmas to accelerate its number of cases from 156 in the week leading up to Christmas to 799 in the past seven days.

Ms Wightman said that she believed Corby’s fiercely close community had, sadly, worked against it.

”Corby is a wonderful place to live,” she said.

“It’s a really tight-knit community and for the most part that’s a huge benefit, particularly when you are looking for people to be supporting each other and coming together.

”The challenge with that over Christmas was that we probably saw a lot more mixing of households in Corby.

”You have got a lot of inter-generational families that live within the area who will have been visiting each other - I’m sure within the rules - but moving around the area and the potential transmission will have increased that way.

”This variant is much more transmissible. You only need a couple of cases because you infect so many more people and it spreads like wildfire and I think Corby is victim to that.”

She also said that Corby’s geography had contributed to the issue.

”When you see how the new variant is spreading it’s following a quite clear pattern of county and borough and district transmission as we slowly go up the country and our case rates have reflected that.

”I think why it’s skirted around the edge and popped up more clearly in Corby is geography. We know that the south east and Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, all these areas have had high rates so we will see a leeching where families are travelling backwards and forwards, maybe before Christmas while we were in tier 2.”

Corby’s industrial makeup has also contributed to its high rates and council leader Tom Beattie has written a letter to the government saying believes the town’s non-essential factories should be shut to help the town get a handle on the spread. MP Tom Pursglove has also raised the issue at ministerial level.

Ms Wightman said that each outbreak was now bigger because of the morecontagious nature of the latest variant.

”We are seeing a much higher level of complexity than we did before, with each outbreak having a number more people in it.

”Corby is not unique in that and Cllr Beattie has written the letter for a reason and I fully support him in that. We are seeing a lot more pupils in schools and workplaces, particularly where have manufacturing and industrial services which clearly can’t be done from home.

”All of these settings are working within the rules but clearly every time you come near somebody else you have the risk of transmitting the virus. The sheer numbers here are still a challenge.”