Coronavirus in Yorkshire: Why expert believes region could be spared worst effects

As the deadly coronavirus pandemic has spread swiftly across the world taking the lives of adults and children, it has quickly become apparent that no one can consider themselves safe from its effects. But one health policy expert believes there is some hope that Yorkshire will be spared from the very worst of the outbreak.  

Peter Bradshaw, Emeritus Professor in Health Policy at the University of Huddersfield, says the geography of the region is likely to work in Yorkshire’s favour in containing the spread of the virus given where the epicentres of the outbreak have been in other areas of the world.

Yorkshire and the Humber has a population of 5.4 million – compared to 8.9 million in London and the region’s population density in 2017 of 353 people per square km is lower than the English national average of 430 people.

Bradshaw says: “It is fundamentally down to the personal and public space we all. In comparison with London, people here don’t have to use the Tube. We have dealt with overcrowding on public transport up here now as sensibly as we could. People tend to live in houses rather than apartments.

“There does seem to be some association with space and the outbreaks.

“That also applies to the great outdoors. I live on the edge of Huddersfield and it is quite possible to walk from here to open fields. If everybody walking is sensible, you have got room to do it.

“I live opposite a public park and while the playground is shut people are still going to walk their dogs and there is decent distancing of people.

“We are being spared to an extent because of our geography.”

While Sheffield is among the areas of the UK with the highest rates of confirmed cases to date, health chiefs in the city have told The Guardian their figures are down in part to a more widespread testing regime than other places, including testing symptomatic NHS workers 11 days before most others areas.

Research by American academics has shown that in the US death rates have been highest in urban areas, while inside major cities places with greater wealth – and populations more easily able to work from home, avoid public transport and have shopping delivered faring better than poorer locations.

In an article for the Citylab website, Richard Florida, the site’s editor-at-large and also a professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Rotman School of Management, explained: “The density that transmits the virus is when people are crammed together in multi-family, multi-generational households or in factories or frontline service work in close physical proximity to one another or the public. Such density is why the earlier 1918 flu pandemic ravaged the working-class neighborhoods of industrial centres of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.”

Bradshaw says: “It comes down to fundamental human contact and if you can avoid it as much as possible.”

It has recently been revealed that the UK is at least a month away from having a workable antibody test that the Government had hoped would show which people had already had the virus and were now immune – thereby bringing about a faster return to some level of normality.
Bradshaw says that particularly without such testing, there is no easy way out of the current lockdown measures and difficult decisions lie ahead.

“It is a case of if we don’t get this, whether the herd immunity argument will come back in. At the moment, we are exposing the young to terrible economic risk and no futures.

“Do we let people go back to school for a start and see where it get us? Do we open up business premises and see where we are after that?”
Bradshaw lived and worked in Hong Kong after the SARS epidemic in 2003 and says people should not expect a swift return to normality.

“Things only really went back to normal when people stopped thinking about it and I would say that took a couple of years before it was part of history and not a current part of the public imagination – that is what will happen here.”

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