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With the roadmap out of lockdown now in Phase One: Part One, it seems like a good time to check out how well London is actually doing at kicking Covid’s ugly ass.
This map helps you do exactly that. It plots weekly government statistics on to a map of the UK and then breaks the information down by postcode. Any area that has cases is coloured from light green through to dark blue and all the way up to burgundy. The darker the shade, the more cases there are. So burgundy isn’t good.
The original map is now redirecting to a government website and it’s probably the most microscopic we’ve got visually for this kind of germ-loaded data. It’s actually plotted by ‘middle super output area’, an area slightly larger than a postcode used by the Office of National Statistics.
You can also click on each area to find out the exact number, which means we can tell you that at the time of writing (March 10), a sample of London cases looks like this: Shoreditch has gone from 11 active Covid cases on February 15 to five today; Notting Hill South has gone from nine in February to fewer than three today; and Peckham North has had a massive shift: from 21 last month to fewer than three now.
Sadly, it’s not all good news. There are some areas of the capital whose Covid cases numbers remain well above the average for England: Abbey Wood North (12 cases, up six this week), East Ham South West (11 cases, up five this week), Bethnal Green East, Lea Bridge, Leytonstone South East and more.
On the whole, though, most postcode regions in the capital are now green, light green or white. This means that they either have low Covid cases or that there are ‘suppressed rates’ of the disease in the area (there have been fewer than three cases in the last seven days). Suppressed spots include areas of Canning Town, Clapham, Hampstead, Wimbledon, Peckham, Nunhead and more. This is huge progress from just a few weeks ago when much of the capital was ominous shades of purple – and it suggests we have passed the latest peak of the virus.
Elsewhere in the UK, green (phew!) dominates most of the south of England as well as Yorkshire, Cumbria, Wales and much of Scotland and Ireland. There are still patches of blue, though, around Manchester, Nottingham, Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow.
A tab has been added to the whole dashboard so you can track the progress of the UK’s vaccination programme (well, you’ve got to get your lockdown kicks somehow). Currently, the first dose of the vaccine has been administered to more than 22.5m people across the country, while the second dose has been given to more than 1m people.
Check it out to see how well your area’s coping.
Read up on the current rules around wearing face masks.
Find out how to help and get help in London right now.