COVID Safety Guidance Issued to Festive Event Organisers

Monday, 29 November 2021 07:34

By Matthew Pells

Event organisers in North Yorkshire have been issued with fresh COVID guidance ahead of the Christmas period.

The information from the county council has been sent to event organisers in the last week. Before the emergence of the Omicron variant.

Public Health consultant Dr Victoria Turner says the guidance has includes details of the measures the authority can take to impose restrictions on events.

Dr Turner says the guidance covers a range of different event types some of which such as singing and shopping are regarded as 'high risk'.

Local authorities are able to, under the current Health protection Regulations, make directions that respond to a serious and imminent threat to public health. This gives powers to give directions which:

Restrict access to, or close, individual premises
Prohibit or restrict certain events (or types of event)
Restrict access to, or close, public outdoor places (or types of outdoor public places)

The guidance gives examples of where an event may be considered to pose a serious and imminent threat to public health under the regulations and says these include:

Very high infection rates based on disease prevalence and transmission rates in the area. Or at a regional or national basis, as appropriate.
Regional and local epidemiological data on case rates, vaccination rates, hospitalisations and deaths because of COVID-19 infections.
Local information and insight on hospital capacity.
Outbreaks of Variants of Concern.
Information or direction from NHS Test and Trace, the Joint Biosecurity Centre, or the UK Health Security Agency (Public Health England).
Documents provided by the event organiser, including arrangements for risk mitigations, in light of the latest government guidance, and the following of working safely, and other relevant, guidance

The full guidance is available here.

Did you find this article useful?

This is the Coast is committed to providing a daily local news service for the Yorkshire Coast. We are a small locally owned and operated business which employs professional journalists and reporters. We do not receive any public funding or grants and we are entirely funded by our local commercial operations. We enjoy fabulous support from local businesses who work with us on their advertising and marketing campaigns, but the cost of providing high quality, well researched, fact checked local news coverage is significant.

If you appreciate what This is the Coast does, and would like to help support our journalism, please consider supporting us on a monthly basis today.

A small contribution from all our readers would really help support independent journalism for the Yorkshire Coast.