RYEDALE residents are the best in the country at following the new “stay at home” rules during the current COVID-19 crisis, according to a new survey.

As of April 2, 98.2 per cent of people living in Ryedale were staying indoors, compared to about 25 per cent of survey respondents from Middlesbrough.

More than 26,700 users of Evergreen Health, an NHS-assured provider of GP services and wellness app, responded to the survey on their behaviour during

the pandemic to help build up a “heat map” of how well different parts of the UK are sticking to the rules.

The anonymised data is being shared with the NHS and data scientists at the universities of Liverpool and Manchester to help them analyse the progress of coronavirus.

Residents are being urged to continue to follow the Government’s advice ahead of the Easter weekend.

A joint statement from Richard Flinton, chairman of the multi-agency North Yorkshire Local Resilience Forum, and Mike Walker, North Yorkshire Police Assistant Chief Constable and Gold commander leading the response to Covid-19 in our area, said they were grateful to the vast majority of people who stayed at home over last weekend and we hope this continues over the Easter weekend.

The statement said: “At this critical time in our effort to control the spread of COVID-19 we are urging people to resist travelling to North Yorkshire’s national parks and coast and to stay at home to save lives.

“The next few weeks could not be more decisive in the nation’s fight to slow the rate of infection of this very dangerous virus that we must make every effort to battle together.

“What we do now will have a bearing on whether more people die or whether lives are spared. If we act irresponsibly more people will die. The choice could not be starker.

“North Yorkshire Police has patrols in place and will be out and about in numbers over the coming days encouraging people to follow the lockdown restrictions, explaining why they are so important and enforcing the regulations where necessary.

“We will be turning people away who do not live here permanently, or have travelled too far to take exercise.

“Although we know that infection rates and the number of deaths are set to rise significantly in North Yorkshire, as elsewhere in the country, the way we act now will have a major impact on how we slow or speed up the infection rate in the coming weeks.”

Meanwhile, Ryedale District Council (RDC) has joined with Welcome to Yorkshire to call for a targeted support package for tourism businesses to help them to cope with the COVID-19 crisis.

Welcome to Yorkshire, the tourism body for Yorkshire and Humberside has published an open letter to the region’s MPs asking them to lobby for additional support for businesses in tourism, hospitality and allied industries.

According to an independent research report commissioned by RDC, the district’s tourism sector is worth more than £318m to Ryedale’s economy, and employs more than 7,550 people. This makes the tourism one of the most important sectors in the district’s economy, and key to its economic development.

As well as joining up with Welcome to Yorkshire to call for more help, RDC has launched an online petition that local tourism businesses can sign to show their support for more targeted assistance.

Cllr Keane Duncan, leader of RDC, said: “This is an incredibly difficult time for the tourism sector, and we know that the situation is really starting to bite.

“The Government has already announced various forms of support to help businesses to survive this incredibly challenging situation, but tourism is so crucial to our district that we need to ask for even more to be done.

“That’s why we are joining with Welcome to Yorkshire in calling for a specific support package for tourism. I hope that tourism businesses in Ryedale and beyond will join the petition and add their voice to ours in this important request. The petition is just one way that we can come together to ask for more help for our district’s tourism industry.”

To join the petition, go to change.org/covid-tourism-support