Covid City rates hit record levels, says health boss
COVID cases have reached record levels in Bristol – and the authorities are now powerless to stop them soaring until everyone is vaccinated, warns the city’s director of public health.
The rate of coronavirus has smashed through the “glass ceiling” to stand at 625 per 100,000 people, higher than at any point during the pandemic and far above the England average of 399, according to Christina Gray.
She told a council meeting there were “no mitigations at our disposal that will stop” the immediate increase in cases and that the number of Bristol hospital patients with Covid-19 was doubling every fortnight, meaning the current total of 50 people would be 200 in a month and 800 in two months at this rate.
Painting a grim picture to Bristol City Council people scrutiny commission members, Ms Gray said the modelling suggested “we could get into difficulty” so the Government could perform some kind of U-turn to “take other action”.
And the local authority officer said the prospects for winter were described as “Covid +” where infectious diseases which have been controlled by coronavirus measures were likely to “come back with a bit of vengeance”.
Speaking on Monday, July 19, “Freedom Day”, she said: “Everybody is really confused but all that has happened today is the law around this has come off – the legal requirements to make space, cover your face, are gone.
“Nothing else has changed. The virus is still around, the risks are still there and we need a bit more time to get the vaccination programme out before we’re really stable.”
Ms Gray said just over half of the city’s population were yet to have both vaccine jabs and that the vast majority would receive them by September, with more pop-ups planned such as the one a few days ago in Primark.
She said test and trace would still be in place and it would remain a legal requirement for those infected to isolate for 10 days but that from August 16 there was a proposed change in the way contacts of those who tested positive were managed, with people who were double vaccinated or who took part in daily contact tracing no longer having to keep away from others.
“We have quite a bumper period to get through from now until August because our infection rates are so high that many businesses are being impacted quite badly by people being contacts,” said Ms Gray.
“So I would anticipate we will see policy changes possibly coming through at the end of August because I’m not sure it’s sustainable at the moment.
“The modelling suggests we could get into difficulty and the Government is keeping its options open in having to pivot around and take other action.
“The national context for this change is that nationally cases, hospitalisations and deaths are rising and are expected to rise.
“We are also anticipating a winter with what we are calling ‘Covid +,’ so all the infectious diseases that had been controlled by the Covid measures – flus, other respiratory viruses and norovirus – are likely to come back with a bit of a vengeance.”
She said 97 per cent of areas in Bristol now had at least one case, compared with just 14 per cent on May 2.
The director said the Delta variant was “out-competing” all the others because it was so transmissible – 70 per cent more so than the Alpha variant which was 60 per cent more transmissible than the original strain.
Showing councillors a graph of Bristol infection rates, which were still rising despite already reaching record levels – shown by a green line – she said: “There are no mitigations we have at our disposal that will stop that.
“We are just about to see the impact of the Euros over the next week or two and the national modelling that won’t flatten until probably late August. But right at the bottom you can see where hospitalisations are – the red line is people in hospital and the blue line is people in intensive care.
“You can see that has broken the link between cases and hospitalisations but not completely, so what that red line is telling us is that we have around 55 to 60 people in hospital and around 10 people in intensive care.”
Modelling suggests we could get into difficulty and the Government is keeping its options open Christina Gray