In prime wedding season, the streets of Whalley Range in Blackburn would normally be bustling with brides buying intricately embroidered luxury silks and guests heading into the sweet shops to pick up boxes of delicately flavoured gifts.
But on this wet Wednesday morning, most of the shops were closed. Others welcomed a handful of customers with signs in the window reminding them to socially distance.
Blackburn, in Lancashire, is facing an increase in coronavirus cases, centred on its large Asian community. On Tuesday the town’s council brought in new restrictions to try to stem the spread of the disease, in what officials described as an urgent effort to avoid a centrally imposed lockdown.
Prof Dominic Harrison, the local authority’s director of public health, said there had been 114 coronavirus cases in the last two weeks, 97 of them among south Asian people.
Ebrahim Chand, 27, who helps to run his family’s laundry business in the area, welcomed the council’s decisive action, saying the government had been too slow to act with the initial nationwide lockdown.
“The numbers are going up, so as a community we need to get on top of this. It is good that the council here are taking matters into their own hands,” he said. “Our friends in the government, like Boris [Johnson], only seem to have a vague idea of what they are doing, and as they discuss what to do our numbers are steadily rising.”
Blackburn is third on the list of places with the highest weekly coronavirus rates, behind Leicester and nearby Pendle.
Analysis by the local authority has shown the emergence of household clusters, where a single person infects a whole household. Harrison said younger south Asian residents may be carrying the virus without any symptoms and passing it on to large multi-generational families.
“So a number of those are causing the rising tide event, and we know that they are in mainly south Asian areas, and they are in areas with high numbers of terraced houses with high numbers of occupants in the house, so four or more, five or more people in the household,” he said.
When the Guardian visited, many people in the town were wearing masks but some food shops continued to serve customers without gloves and with no access to hand sanitiser for customers.
Akbar Ghantiwala, who runs the fabric shop Glamour, said he had not sold a dress in four months and his business would not survive another lockdown. He urged people to adhere to hygiene rules and social distancing guidelines.
“We have heard about people starting to go to gatherings and I say please stop this. My shop was closed for three months and still now I only have a few customers,” he said. “I am really struggling and we won’t get through it again. I just ask, please, please listen. We have already had plenty dead here and we can’t have more,” he added.
