There were initial delays in Covid-19 data from government, Portsmouth's public health director says

During a health overview and scrutiny panel (Hosp) meeting this week members asked if there had been a hold-up in data from government.

In response, Helen Atkinson - the interim director of public health at Portsmouth City Council - said: 'If you had asked me three weeks ago I would have agreed, now it has changed.

'Around the time of the Leicester outbreak we were only receiving numbers and we could only get those from the national website the same as everyone else from the pillar one testing data.

'But the week just before Leicester went into lockdown there was an agreement and the Local Resilience Forum has been asking for more data.

'We were asked that week to sign a data sharing agreement with Public Health England and that week we started to receive the pillar two data. So we now get that every day.

'And once a week we get the granular data which is the postcode, age and sex of a person and we are hoping at some point in the future we will get ethnicity as well because we have got a big focus on supporting our BAME community because they are at higher risk from complications of Covid-19.

'We are now getting that on a weekly basis and starting to map the confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Portsmouth and all the local authorities across Hampshire.

'It is fair to say there was quite a lot of criticism early on for some elements of the testing to come back. But it's fair to say that we haven't seen that more recently. But testing has been sped up in terms of the results.'

Gosport councillor Philip Raffaelli added: 'It makes me cringe that a lot of data wasn't available until you had signed an agreement.

'GDPR is there for a reason but it is not the first example during the pandemic of how it has delayed things. We couldn't get our hands on a list of people shielding until we had signed it and that took 10 weeks. We need to have in place data sharing agreements in advance.'

Local coronavirus testing is also being carried out at the Tipner site in Portsmouth and in care homes.

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