If true then at least they are consistent as when Wigan and Stockport went from 3 to 2 Trafford said no then and stayed in 3
I think he might have just misunderstood my post last night referring to Trafford rejecting the offer last time round and why it benefited Trafford to say no and Stockport who said yes quickly ended up back in and got overtaken by Trafford as top borough in GM. I may well not have clarified that.
Though if you look at the GM Pop scores as of yesterday below half of them are now under the 200 cases per 100,000 limit usually applied to define tier 2 or 3. And the rest not far above it.
See below - with the current numbers v the ones used by the government to declare GM in tier 3. I show the ones from about 14 days ago to remove the impact of the student reallocation that increased numbers in GM artificially for a few days. No idea if the government took that into account. But a fairer comparison removes that impact. But they always used finalised case data nearly a week old so its a fair comparison.
Last Night:
TRAFFORD 122, STOCKPORT 150, TAMESIDE 158, SALFORD 164, MANCHESTER 194, BURY 223, WIGAN 224, BOLTON 225, OLDHAM 256, ROCHDALE 287
14 days ago:
STOCKPORT 347, TRAFFORD 372, MANCHESTER 403, TAMESIDE 421, BOLTON 470, WIGAN 470, SALFORD 479,
BURY 512, ROCHDALE 516, OLDHAM 619
As you can see there was a HUGE change between the data when they based the decisions and right now.
So just taking Trafford out now would be unreasonable and lead to anger elsewhere.
More importantly, Trafford and GM is where they are now because the recent lockdown has got it there. Opening up one or more areas in GM would reverse that and by Christmas when most restrictions go for five days it could result in a third wave that will lock down GM for the rest of the Winter.
I think coming out of tier 3 would be a serious mistake for any borough.
But I understand the temptation as it might be the difference between survival of a livelihood or not.
What it must NOT be is a politically motivated decision.
