| STATESIDE So where do we rank in the coronavirus infection league?
HOW many people have had coronavirus in the West Midlands – and how widespread is the infection today?
Official health bodies publish a range of information about the Covid-19 virus. It gives us some idea how the West Midlands compares to other parts of the country.
It’s worth noting at the outset that the data we have is incomplete and much of it is based on estimates. But it’s the best information available to us – and to the people making decisions on our behalf.
Figures published by Public Health England show 15,864 people in the West Midlands region have tested positive for coronavirus. This means 268.8 people have tested positive for every 100,000 people living here.
The infection rate is lower than in many other parts of the country. For example, in the North East it is 358.8 per 100,000 people. In the North West it is 326.2.
In Birmingham 3,303 people have tested positive. That gives an infection rate of 289.4. And Birmingham’s figure is much lower than in many other cities and towns. Sunderland has the highest infection rate out of any upper tier local authority in England. This refers to councils that are not part of larger councils.
So far, 1,351 people have tested positive for the Covid-19 coronavirus in Sunderland. That’s 487 people for every 100,000 people living in the area served by the council.
Gateshead has the second highest infection rate, at 484.9 people per 100,000. South Tyneside is third, with an infection rate of 475.2, and Middlesbrough is fourth, with an infection rate of 451.1.
However, if you look at lower-tier councils – which tend to serve towns or small cities which also have county councils – you see that the place with the worst infection rate is actually Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, where the infection rate is 826.7.
The regional and local figures only include the results of tests carried out directly by the NHS and Public
Health England. They don’t include tests conducted by private sector partners.
And if more people are found to have coronavirus, that could be partly because more people have been tested. In other words, the high figures for the North East could be a result of the region’s success in testing people.
Separate figures published by
Public Health England and Cambridge University, now a week old, show that 11 per cent of people in the West Midlands are believed to have had Covid-19. This is similar to many other parts of the country.
The experts guess – and it’s only an estimated guess – that 11 per cent of people in the North East and
Yorkshire (classed as one region in this study) have had Covid-19, and 14 per cent in the North West.
The rate of infection in the South West appears to be low, at just 5 per cent.
But in London, 20 per cent of the population, one in five, have been infected.
One of the most important statistics is the “R” figure. This is the rate at which the virus reproduces.
If R is 1.2 then it means every 10 people who have Covid-19 are passing it on to 12 people between them. This means the virus will spread exponentially.
The Government says all its decisions are designed to keep R below 1.
The most recent estimate for R in the West Midlands is 0.68.
The same study estimated that the
“R” rate in the North East and Yorkshire is the highest in the country, at 0.8. This means that every 10 people who have the disease spread it to eight people between them.
The R rate is lowest in London, at 0.4. If those figures are correct – and they are the best guess the experts can give us – the number of cases is falling everywhere. But they are falling more slowly in the North East and Yorkshire than in other parts of England.
The number of deaths is taking 8.6 days to halve in the West Midlands.
This rather grim figure is a way of telling how quickly the spread of the virus is shrinking. And it’s happening more quickly in the West Midlands than in any other regon other than London.
There is another set of figures to consider. If you consider the number of people who have died from Covid-19, adjusted to take into account the size of the population, more people died in London boroughs than anywhere else.
The London borough of Newham has the worst death rate, with 208 deaths from Covid-19, or 144.3 deaths per 100,000 people. Birmingham had 625 deaths at this point, a death rate of 77.5 deaths per 100,000 people (around 8 deaths per 1,000 people). The overall death rate for the West Midlands was 64.7.
The death rate for the North East as a region is 37.3 deaths from Covid-19 per 100,000 people in the population – lower than in the West Midlands.
In the London region it is 85.7 deaths per 100,000 people.
These figures are the most recent available, but they only go up to April 17, so the situation may have changed (death figures are published regularly but these figures are produced by experts to show the death rate in relation to the population, adjusted to take into account factors such as age).
Taken as a whole, the statistics could be taken to suggest that London was initially hit much harder than any other area of the country – but is also recovering first, given that it currently has the lowest R rate. Parts of the North had fewer deaths up to mid-April, but appear currently to have a high R rate. And the Midlands is somewhere in the middle.
11 per cent of people in the West Midlands are believed to have had Covid-19