40 , 000 people could have Covid in Derby, says new research
CASE RATE COULD BE FAR HIGHER THAN REPORTED
AN estimated 40,000 people in Derby may currently have Covid-19, new research suggests, and the city’s public health director says this is entirely realistic.
Dr Robyn Dewis, the city’s public health director, says data shows there have been 5,000 cases of Covid-19 recorded in the most recent week in Derby, up from around 1,000 a week during the summer -and the current figure continues to rise.
However, many cases are never formally reported.
This means that the real number of people in the city with the virus is likely to be far higher.
Some people actively choose not to get tested and others have no knowledge that they have the virus due to a lack of symptoms.
On top of this, there have been widespread issues of people not being able to get a test.
Data from the Office for National Statistics estimates that one in every 15 people currently have Covid-19 due to the surge of the Omicron variant and mixing over the festive season.
In Derby, Dr Dewis says this equates to 40,000 people in the city who currently have Covid-19, which she says “feels completely realistic”, due to the challenges around testing and people being less likely to come forward for testing over Christmas and the New Year.
She says the proportion of the city’s PCR tests which have shown positive Covid-19 results is at 40 per cent, up from around 10 per cent in early December.
Dr Dewis says this displays that the city is not “capturing” all the positive cases it needs to. She said: “Although we are reporting almost 5,000 cases, the actual number will be much larger than that.
“We’ve never managed to identify the true number of cases that there probably are in the city and there are lots of different reasons for that. Some of those people have no idea that they are infected.”
Asked about what she expects to see happen in the next few weeks, Dr Dewis said: “We have seen an increase in the younger adult age groups and we are now seeing an increase in the over-60 age groups and anticipate that those will continue to rise over the next week or so.
“What they have seen in London is that the younger group has levelled off but that the over 60s age group is continuing to climb and we suspect that we are about a week behind London.
“There is no reason to expect that that increase is going to slow over the next few weeks.”
Dr Dewis has urged people to continue testing regularly using lateral flow tests. She said that if you develop symptoms you should book a PCR test through the Government website, lateral flows should only be used if you do not have symptoms.
Dr Dewis said that fewer people were requiring intensive care treatment despite the all-time peak in Covid cases, due to vaccination and immunity gained over the past two years.
However, she stressed: “It does still mean that people who are clinically vulnerable or have not responded well to vaccination – and have not produced antibodies well – or those individuals who have not been vaccinated still remain incredibly vulnerable to the virus.”
She said it remained “particularly important” to get vaccinated and that people should not feel like they have “missed the boat” on getting their jabs.
Dr Dewis said the Omicron variant, which is now dominant throughout the UK, spreads much quicker and spreads to more people per infected person, and is also “more airborne”.
She said this made it even more important to meet people outdoors if possible and to have consistent ventilation indoors - largely through keeping windows and doors open.
This is a difficult ask during the winter months, Dr Dewis says, but reiterates that the “chance of contracting the virus is just so high”.
She said there was a significant level of uncertainty around staffing pressures throughout the public sector, including in social care, which the city council oversees.
Dr Dewis said staff in health and social care are part of regular workplace testing so cases are more regularly picked up and the pressure on absences is more keenly felt.
She said: “The immediate pressing issue is how we keep the wheels turning. We just don’t know what this is going to be like in the next few weeks.”
Dr Dewis said that the narrative of Omicron being more mild misses a key point that while fewer people will suffer a “severe outcome” from the virus, this is still a large number of people and the most at risk are already the most vulnerable.
All of this comes as Derbyshire clocks its highest ever week for Covid cases, in excess of 23,000 cases in a week – three times its previous record.
Meanwhile Royal Derby Hospital is now caring for more than 100 Covid patients for the first time in the best part of a year, though this included just four virus patients in intensive care.
Nearly all of the Covid patients are unvaccinated, a leading nurse told the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
A key issue is staff absences with around 1,000 hospital staff off either ill with Covid or self-isolating or awaiting results of a test.
This equates to one out of every 14 staff associated with the trust, all impacted by one illness, all at the same time, approaching the peak of winter, when health services are under the most pressure. This is leaving the Derby and Burton hospital trust to consider suspending elective care – other than cancer, Covid or emergency care – in the next nine days. Yesterday, it tightened visitor restrictions to limit patients to one visitor per day for one hour, with this visitor ideally being the same person. Visitors are also asked to supply evidence of a negative lateral flow test before visiting a patient.
There is no reason to expect that that increase is going to slow over the next few weeks.
Dr Robyn Dewis