‘WE NEED TO BE PUSHING MORE THROUGH TESTING’
Health chief warning as covid cases rise
COVID cases are on the rise again in Stoke-on-trent – and one health boss says not enough people are being tested in the city.
Stoke-on-trent City Council’s Health and Wellbeing Board heard that, as of Tuesday, the seven-day covid case rate in the city was 459.9 per 100,000 people – a 23 per cent increase on the previous week.
Now Dr Paul Edmondson-jones says the Potteries is wrestling with an ‘enormous’ number of cases.
Dr Edmondson-jones, director of adult social care, health integration and wellbeing at the council, said: “We had 197 new cases on Tuesday.
“In the last week we had 1,179 positive cases in the city, which is what’s giving us that rate of 459.9.
“That’s an enormous number for us still to be having, but we are running with the rest of the pack across the country.
“We dropped to a low of 363.1 on November 9 and since then we’ve been coming back up slowly.
“England has been doing exactly the same so the average now is over 400. The West Midlands average is over 400.
“On Tuesday we were the 55th upper tier local authority in England and the sixth local authority in the West Midlands. We’re just tracking along with everybody.
“The rates across Staffordshire are varying between Tamworth at 546 and Stafford at 403. We have Tamworth, Staffordshire Moorlands, East
Staffordshire and Cannock Chase all at over 500 at the moment.
“We’ve got a positivity rate (percentage of test results that are positive) at the moment of 11.1 per cent, which is far too high. We want to see that much lower – it did get down a week ago to about 10 per cent but has pushed back up to 11 per cent again, which is effectively telling us we’re not testing enough people and we need to be pushing more people through testing.”
Latest figures also revealed there were 60 patients with Covid-19 being treated at Royal Stoke University Hospital and eight in critical care.
Dr Edmondson-jones added: “Over the past five weeks we have seen a gradual decline in the overall circulating rate of covid compared to where we were before. That’s now starting to reflect itself in the hospital figures, because there is always a lag of several weeks.
“My worry is that we’re now seeing that rise coming through again over the last week and that will start to push back into the hospital, probably in about three or four weeks’ time.
“The majority of our cases are still in the five to 10 and 11 to 18 age group – not as stark as it was before. When we started last term there was a huge bulge, particularly in secondary school children. That’s come back a little bit now and so we’re seeing them come back in line with the adult population.
“In terms of the number of deaths we’ve had, we’re still running below the seasonal average for the overall number of deaths in the city – and a very small number of those are covid deaths.”