Picture across Wales ‘a positive story’

THE number of cases and deaths involving coronavirus reported every day in Wales have been telling a positive story for several weeks.

For the second time this week, there were no new coronavirus deaths reported to Public Health Wales (PHW) yesterday.

The agency has not been notified of a death involving Covid-19 since Monday.

There are also fewer than 25 cases being reported to the public health body every day, despite the fact testing levels are much higher than they were at the start of the outbreak – with 4,319 new tests done on Thursday alone.

Yet the virus remains in circulation in Wales.

There are only three of Wales’s 22 council areas that have seen no cases this week – and only one area that has seen no cases in the past fortnight. There are also two Welsh council areas that have seen significantly more cases diagnosed than were found in the other 20.

The number of cases being reported every day in Wales – and where they are from – now includes all the tests done by both the NHS and by the private sector Lighthouse Labs in England, which processes the tests people are sent to do in their own home. Wrexham has been seeing by far the most transmission of Covid-19 in the past seven days.

It follows an outbreak linked to the Rowan Foods meat processing plant in the town. However the Welsh Government has said the plant is not the source of the cases. The 20 cases diagnosed in Wrexham in the last seven days have also not all been linked to the factory.

The number of cases in Wrexham is equivalent to 14.7 cases for every 100,000 people in the council area in the past seven days. To put this in context, at the height of the outbreak in late

March, Newport saw 110 cases for every 100,000 people in a week.

This is even more stark when you consider that there were 642 tests done in Wrexham in the past week and only 3.1% were positive. In the week of its peak in early March, Newport only did 340 tests of which slightly over 50% were positive.

At the moment, all but one of the seven councils with the most cases of Covid-19 in the past week are all in North Wales. Conwy has had 11.1 cases per 100,000 people, Gwynedd 8.8, Anglesey 7.1, Flintshire 5.1 and Denbighshire 4.2. The only one outside of North Wales is Merthyr, where there have been a number of cases linked to a cluster at the town’s Kepak meat processing facility, and which had 6.6 cases in the last week.

The previous week (June 29 to July 5) is strikingly similar to the past seven days.

Wrexham again had the most cases, although a far higher number (52) were diagnosed the previous week, which equates to 38.2 cases for every 100,000 people.

The good news is that in nearly all council areas infection rates fell from that week (to July 5) and the most recent seven day period.

The only areas to see slight rises were Pembrokeshire and Monmouthshire, which had no cases that week but one and three respectively the following week, and Gwynedd and Conwy which did see rises.

Overall, however, the overwhelming trend is downwards – despite the significantly higher number of tests being done.

In the 14 days to July 13, Leicester saw 643 positive tests in the area that was locked down again. The city has an estimated population of 417,829.

Wales, with a population of 3.2 million, has only seen 244 positive tests in the past 14 days.