Salford has 155 new confirmed cases of coronavirus bringing the cumulative total to 5,391, up from the previous day's 5,236. The city has now had 1,056 virus cases over the last seven days.
Elsewhere in Greater Manchester, cases in Manchester rose to 14,338 (up from 14,026), followed by Bolton 6,993 (up from 6,831), Oldham with 6,224 (up from 6,108), Wigan 6,289 (up from 6,101), Tameside 4,654 (up from 4,550) Rochdale 5,432 (up from 5,311), Stockport 4,573 (up from 4,478), Bury 4,253 (up from 4,161) and Trafford 4,120 (up from 4,012).
There have been no new deaths at Salford Royal Hospital.
Last night, Greater Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, and the leaders of the ten GM boroughs, including Salford City Mayor, Paul Dennett, released a statement offering to again meet with the Government to break the Tier 3 restriction deadlock, adding that they "firmly believe that protecting health is about more than controlling the virus"...
The full statement from last night reads...
"At our last meeting with Downing Street officials yesterday morning, we were told they would arrange a further meeting later in the day to provide a response to our requests. That did not happen and, despite being on standby all day today, we are still waiting for it to be arranged. We can assure the Prime Minister that we are ready to meet at any time to try to agree a way forward.
"We can also say with confidence that we have done, and will continue to do, everything within our power to protect the health of our residents, including being the first area in the country to agree to local restrictions back in July. We are not convinced that closing hospitality venues is the only way to protect hospitals and we want to look at other measures such as reinstating shielding arrangements and introducing tougher instant closure powers on non-compliant pubs, restaurants, shops and other business premises.
"We firmly believe that protecting health is about more than controlling the virus and requires proper support for people whose lives would be severely affected by a Tier 3 lockdown. We do not believe that the current proposals provide adequate support and that is why we await further talks with the Government..."
Meanwhile, fast mass saliva testing 'Moonshot' that was to be trialled in Salford to the whole population, which was paused until this week, has now been 're-focused' on 'high risk environments'.
The Moonshot, which was supposed to test asymptomatic people and provide results in twenty minutes originally, is currently taking 48 hours to give results and was paused because priority in the labs was for symptomatic testing as cases increased.
Now the hope is to expand the testing to 'potentially' one thousand people per day in targeted high risk groups..."The test is less invasive than the swab test and was given a thumbs up by the volunteers involved" says Councillor Gina Reynold, Lead Member for Adult Services, Health and Wellbeing "We have tested groups of our workforce and received encouraging feedback from schools as the small scale use of saliva testing with teaching staff has kept classes open when one member of the team had to self-isolate."
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