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“A rough long winter” is ahead, council leaders have declared as they extended Caerphilly County Borough’s local lockdown for a further week.

Caerphilly County Borough Council leader Philippa Marsden and chief executive Christina Harrhy announced the latest extension in a joint-statement released today (October 15).

Local lockdown restrictions have been in place in the borough since September 8.

It means that extended households are suspended and no-one is allowed to travel into or out of the county without a “reasonable excuse”.

Cllr Marsden and Ms Harrhy said: “It seems we are about to enter a very rough and long winter. We will only get through these challenging times if we continue to work together and take individual and collective responsibility for our actions.

“We know that many of you are making many personal sacrifices in order to comply with the restrictions and we ask that you stick with it.

“Christmas is drawing ever closer and nobody wants to see restrictions over the festive period, so let’s make a collective effort to help drive these cases down.”

In their update, the leaders point to worsening statistics on the spread of Covid-19.

They said: “You would have seen in the media that there has been a significant escalation over recent days and Welsh Government has indicated that they are giving serious consideration to a short ‘circuit breaker’ to delay the continued spread of the virus across Wales.

“The NHS is coming under increasing pressure having seen an increase in the number of Covid cases present in hospitals. Over the past week hospital admissions have increased from 500 to 700 across Wales. If this rate of increase continues there are concerns that, within a short space of time, the NHS will not be able to cope.

“We have also been advised that the ‘R’ Rate today stands at 1.4 [across Wales], which is a real cause for concern. This being reflected in Caerphilly’s position, which is 109.9 cases per 100,000 population with a positivity rate of 9.3 %

“We’ve seen many comments from people saying that ‘local lockdowns are not working’ – but we disagree. I’m sure you can imagine how worse the situation would be if we hadn’t introduced the restrictions when we did. It is clear from the UK-wide data that all our efforts have prevented the kind of very large spikes of infection we are seeing elsewhere in the UK.”

The two leaders also said that previous work on an exit strategy was “almost irrelevant” because of the changing situation and the likelihood of a Wales-wide approach being adopted by Welsh Government.