West Berkshire Council: New one-stop shop for lockdown rules and local data across Berkshire

As England enters a second national restriction, West Berkshire Council has announced the launch of a Covid-19 Dashboard designed to provide residents with comprehensive guidance on the national restrictions that will remain in place until Wednesday 2 December. Created to meet the needs of the local community, the website: https://www.berkshirepublichealth.co.uk/went live today and is the first of its kind in the UK.

On the ‘My Local Area’ section of the website, users can enter their full postcode for information on the rules and regulations to follow under this national restrictions. The site also provides a wealth of local information, including real-time data on Covid-19 across Berkshire, making it easily accessible to the county’s population of nearly one million residents. Using the dashboard’s interactive map, residents can search for results in their area and compare them with statistics for the rest of the county, the South East region and England as a whole.

Leader of West Berkshire Council, Lynne Doherty, said: “We know residents are concerned about how to protect themselves and everyone in their household, and understandably they want easy access to what is and isn’t allowed during these latest national restrictions. The new Covid-19 Dashboard is a great one-stop-shop for all the information people need on the restrictions, plus local statistics relating to the virus.”

As well as critical national restriction information, the site provides users with specific data on Covid-19 for each of Berkshire’s six local authority areas, including:

• Daily new case numbers and total cases
• Daily number of cases in graph format since the start of the pandemic in March
• Daily new cases for England and total cases for England since records began
• Weekly death rate and location (care home, at home, hospital, etc.)
• Data for 111 and 999 calls triaged for people with suspected Covid-19 symptoms plus the number of daily online assessments.

Tessa Lindfield, Strategic Director of Public Health for East Berkshire, added: “This innovative website is a go-to resource for all the latest lockdown information. It also allows our communities to see what’s really happening in their area – how many positive cases there are each day or week, how many deaths and where these are sadly happening.

“We urge residents to visit https://www.berkshirepublichealth.co.uk/ to read the government guidance on what they can and cannot do. Remember the importance of hands, face, space, observe social distancing and be sure that if you do have to go out, you’re not bringing Covid-19 back into your home.

“We want to keep our communities safe and well. Together, we can break the Covid chain by following the guidance and by isolating when required. We believe this new website will help us all to stick to the rules.”