Coronavirus: Leicester local lockdown a reminder that risk is not gone

Right at the moment when the prime minister is planning to turn the page to usher in a different political phase, the reinstatement of some restrictions on people's lives in Leicester is a reminder that the risk to our health from the coronavirus crisis is neither gone, nor forgotten.

Ministers have been clear for some weeks that the possibility of 'local lockdowns' was very real.

And the announcement from the health secretary on Monday evening was not just to put the brakes on easing of elements of the lockdown, he has also reversed some of the changes that have already been made: closing non-essential shops again, and schools - aside from the children of key workers, or the vulnerable - restricted.

It is not a small ask of the people of Leicester, a major city, to watch the rest of the country progress, while they have to go into reverse for now, to protect everyone's health.

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But this kind of on, and off, measure may become a regular feature of how the government tries to manage the infection as the months pass.

And there are already questions from opposition politicians about why speculation was allowed to build over the last few days about whether it was going to happen at all.

Local leaders expressed significant frustration, too, at a lack of coordination and information sharing about exactly what was going on.

On Tuesday Boris Johnson will make big promises using echoes of the past, the New Deal that took the United States out of the Great Depression, to try to show that the government has the imagination and the drive to move the country out of the worst phases of the pandemic.

But just as he and the Cabinet are starting to focus on the risk of very widespread financial hardship, what's happening in Leicester makes it clear that the balance between managing public health and how the country makes its living is still precarious too.