Current data offers reasons to be hopeful

THERE is some very promising news within the current Covid data for Wales.

Despite skyrocketing cases on the continent there are some very real reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the direction of travel in Wales.

The Post has gone through the latest Public Health Wales coronavirus data to try to make sense of what is happening at the moment.

Since the beginning of November the infection rate in Wales has been the definition of up and down.

At the start of the month Wales saw almost a fortnight of falling cases followed by just over a week of increasing cases. However on Monday the infection rate fell again for the first time in over a week with a further fall yesterday.

The latest seven-day infection rate across Wales, based on the cases for every 100,000 people for the seven days up to November 18, now stands at 511.1 – a drop from the 521 reported on Monday.

Though cases had been rising for over a week epidemiologists still felt that Wales was trending down even before the drop of the last few days. If you look over a longer period the trend is still going down or is at least stable.

Speaking to us last week Professor Michael Gravenor, one of the epidemiologists from Swansea University who model the data for the Welsh Government, said: “I don’t think we can say the cases are rising at the moment. The general trend is still flat or a little downwards.”

There is also good news when it comes to test positivity. The percentage of tests coming back positive, another key indicator as to the extent of the virus, has been consistently stable. Since the start of November it has never gone above 20% after peaking at more than 27% in October.

The encouraging news continues with the current hospital data.

There are currently 58 cases of Covid patients in ICU beds, down from 75 on November 5. The number of confirmed Covid cases in hospital beds is also now 468 which is slightly down from 590 at the start of November.

However it is worth bearing in mind that though the figures are heading in the right direction the number of cases requiring hospital treatment is still very high. Before Covid the Welsh NHS was routinely overwhelmed due to routine winter pressure. Every Covid case in hospitals makes it harder to manage the upcoming period and to work through the substantial elective surgery backlog.