Borough’s COVID case rate higher than Slough

ROYAL BOROUGH: Health bosses have offered a possible explanation as to why the Royal Borough’s COVID case rate is higher than Reading and Slough, writes James Bagley, Local Democracy Reporter.

Throughout the course of the pandemic, both Slough and Reading have had the highest COVID rates and deaths within Berkshire due to dense population, but now the Royal Borough is starting to become the newest hotspot as cases spike across the country due to a new sub-variant.

Cases began to dip when lockdown restrictions were eased thanks to the vaccination programme but now a highly transmissible Omicron variant known as BA.2 is driving numbers back up again.

As of Monday, the Royal Borough recorded 618 cases. Slough recorded 270, Reading was 460, West Berkshire had 787, Wokingham saw 762, and Bracknell recorded 575 cases.

Speaking at an RBWM outbreak engagement board meeting on Monday, public health consultant Anna Richards said the borough’s high number of cases could be tied to its high testing rate.

According to Berkshire Public Health, the Royal Borough has 275 per 100,000 of its population testing rate, which is the highest within the county, nearly 20 per cent of which have tested positive from March 6 to 12. Ms Richards said they can only pick up the cases if people test more and believed the testing rates in the other neighbouring authorities are lower than RBWM.

David Scott, head of communities, said at the meeting : “We believe that’s because our residents have been good at taking the advice that we’ve been giving about using tests proactively. And so we’ve had higher numbers of people testing and recording those test results, which we believe has contributed towards our position looking relatively worse compared to Slough particularly, which is obviously on the border, less so with Reading but a similarly more densely populated area than ourselves.

“So, we do believe that is part of the factor overall, but it isn’t an absolute explanation for the variations that we’ve seen.”