The number of people being admitted to hospital to be treated for Covid continues to fall in the former Indian Delta variant “hotspot” Bolton. The MailOnline has the story.
[The] latest NHS figures show there were 42 people in hospital in the Royal Bolton Hospital with the virus on June 1st, last Tuesday, down from 49 at the peak of the new variant scare a week earlier.The number of people being admitted to hospital each day has tumbled, too, to just three on May 30 compared to 14 five days before. The numbers are trailing a decline in cases which appears to show a spike in new variant cases has come under control.
The same pattern is hopefully beginning to unfold in neighbouring Blackburn, the U.K.’s current hotspot which has also been hit by the Indian “Delta” strain, where infection numbers among over-60s have started to fall following a rise.
Although the borough’s infection rate was still rising at the end of May, a decline in infections among older people should help officials to keep hospital admissions and deaths under control.
More than 12,000 cases of the B.1.617.2 variant have been spotted so far in the U.K. and Public Health England last week admitted for the first time that it has become the most common variant in Britain. Almost one in five officially recorded cases – 2,149 – have been in Bolton, with another 724 in Blackburn with Darwen.
But the fact that Bolton has turned the tide of the super-infectious strain suggests it can be successfully controlled without lockdowns, instead using testing, contact tracing and vaccinations.
Covid hospital admissions started rising in Bolton in the first week of May around 10 days after cases began to rise – it can take several weeks for infected patients to become ill enough to need medical care…
Its coronavirus infection rate spiked 10-fold from just 44 cases per 100,000 people in the week ending April 22nd to a peak of 453 per 100,000 a month later on May 21st.
Cases have been most common in under-55s, who are least likely to have had two doses of a vaccine, but hospital admissions rose in the wake of the rocketing cases. Only a small fraction of patients had been fully vaccinated.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock last week admitted the link between infections and hospital admissions, which vaccines should separate, has so far been “broken but not completely severed”.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: According to the Prime Minister’s spokesman, quoted in the Guardian, “[it] still remains that there is nothing in the data currently to suggest step four [of the lockdown roadmap] can’t go ahead at the earliest date”.
But we do need to look very closely at the data over this coming week, which will be crucial to decide and really to get a sense of the data, particularly on hospitalisations and whether or not the excellent vaccine rollout programme has sufficiently severed that link between the increase in cases, which we always expected to happen, particularly after step three, and that subsequently leading to hospitalisations and deaths.
Worth reading in full.
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