County’s high winter death total prompts Covid query from MP
A HIGH number of deaths in Ceredigion at the start of 2020 should be investigated to find out whether coronavirus was to blame, an MP has said.
Figures obtained by Newyddion S4C reveal that in the first 17 weeks of the year there were 342 deaths registered in the county.
That is nearly a quarter more than the average for the last five years, according to a BBC report.
Ceredigion MP Ben Lake is now calling for an investigation to find out if Covid-19 was circulating in the area before the pandemic was declared.
Mr Lake said he wanted the number of deaths to be examined in detail to ensure that nothing had been missed which could help prevent a second wave of the virus this winter, North Wales Live reports.
But experts say coronavirus was unlikely to be the cause of the surge in deaths.
The pandemic wasn’t confirmed to have spread to Wales until February 28, 2020, when a person who had recently returned from Italy tested positive in Swansea.
Meanwhile, the first known case of community transmission in Wales, in the Caerphilly area, wasn’t confirmed until March 11.
According to data from the Office for National Statistics, seven people have died from suspected coronavirus in Ceredigion, which is the lowest number recorded across all of the 22 counties in Wales.
Information from Public Health Wales shows there have been fewer than 100 confirmed cases in Ceredigion, again the lowest in Wales.
In comparison, there have been 4,336 cases of the virus in North Wales, with 373 losing their lives.
Wales’s chief medical officer has cast doubt on the theory by Mr Lake, instead suggesting that there may be fluctuations and statistical changes which might account for the rise.
He stressed the high number of deaths was not likely to be the result of an early coronavirus outbreak.
“I think it’s extremely unlikely that coronavirus was in Ceredigion before it was in Wuhan,” he said.
Rhian Daniel, a reader in medical statistics at Cardiff University, also doubted the presence of coronavirus in the community at that time.
She told the BBC it is more likely that a similar infection was circulating in Ceredigion.
Hywel Dda University Health Board medical director and deputy chief executive Phil Kloer told the BBC: “The main difference between January 2019 and January 2020 data is within hospital deaths, and at this time we did see an increase in respiratory viruses causing pressure on our hospital services.”