‘Covid-19 is not going away’ warns health chief

‘Covid isn’t going away’, health chiefs have warned Sunderland’s families.

Months of lockdown and the roll out of vaccines have seen infection rates steadily declining across Wearside, along with ‘significant’ falls in the number of people dying from the virus or needing hospital treatment.

But recent success in fighting off the disease has prompted concerns the city could go into reverse if it is used as an excuse to flout restrictions.

“Obviously, the rates are coming down, you’ve got the Prime Minister’s roadmap, vaccinations are rolling out,” said city councillor Neil MacKnight.

“But the concern I have is that there’s a sense almost in the community that we’ve got this thing beaten and the worry is that people are maybe being a little bit premature.”

Cllr MacKnight was speaking at a meeting of Sunderland City Council’s Health and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee, which was held by videolink and broadcast via YouTube.

Almost 96,000 people in the city have now had their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, with about 2,880 second jabs scheduled to be delivered this week.

The government hopes to have scaled back infections rates enough by June 21 to scrap all current restrictions on social contact.

But health chiefs have repeatedly warned none of the dates for the phased reopening of the country are “set in stone” and are all dependent on the existing scheme going to plan.

According to the Office for National Statistics, 41% of over 80s surveyed admitted breaking lockdown rules after receiving their first jab.

A postgraduate research student at Durham University has won silver, receiving a £750 prize and a medal, for the excellence of her physics research in a national competition.

For three years, as her PhD project, Vicky Fawcett has been investigating quasars, their properties and how they may link in galaxy evolution.

Quasars are astronomical objects, powered by gas, that spiral into extremely large black holes. They are found in the centres of some galaxies and outshine the entire galaxy they sit in.

Most appear very blue, but there are some that show much redder colours. By researching the properties of these red quasars, Vicky and her team have added weight to an emerging idea that red quasars are fundamentally different objects to blue quasars.

The differences they have found could indicate that red quasars represent an important phase in galaxy evolution. She presented this research to politicians and a panel of expert judges as part of the annual poster competition STEM for BRITAIN.

It is run by the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee in collaboration with the Institute of Physics and other learned societies. Vicky was judged against other shortlisted physicists from across Britain. The competition also includes categories for chemists, biologists, engineers and mathematicians.

She said: “In my research, I have found fundamental differences in the radio properties of red quasars that support this evolutionary model.”