Covid: UK records 141,472 new cases and 97 deaths
Infection rates rising in much of country, data suggests, despite number of cases reported UK-wide appearing to fall for several days
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Your support makes all the difference.The UK has reported a further 97 possible coronavirus deaths and 141,472 newly-confirmed infections, the latter down 5,000 from the previous day.
While overall case numbers have now fallen for several consecutive days, the figures are typically lower on weekends, and infection rates appear to be rising significantly in many local areas – particularly in the north of England.
Even if case numbers “have stabilised over the whole country”, they will have done so at very high levels and will not “come down rapidly”, leading statistician Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter said on Sunday, estimating that actual daily infections could still be hitting around 500,000.
The unprecedented surge of cases driven by the new Omicron variant in London appears to be slowing, some experts have suggested – but the potential for resurgence in the capital is feared as a result of people returning to schools and the workplace after the festive break.
Meanwhile, week-on-week infection rates are more than tripling in some parts of north west and north east England, according to the most recent analysis of testing figures.
Since Monday, more than 1.2 million people have tested positive for the virus, the UK Health Security Agency said on Sunday, representing a 6.6 per cent increase on the previous week.
According to the most recent figures, hospitals are also seeing an increase in need. On Thursday, there were 18,454 people in hospital with coronavirus – up from 14,126 a week before on New Year’s Eve. Just under five per cent of patients required mechanical ventilation to help them breathe.
“What we are seeing from hospital admissions is that stays in hospital do appear to be on average shorter, which is good news,” Professor Mike Tildesley, a disease modeller at the University of Warwick, said on Saturday.
But at least 25 NHS trusts have declared critical incidents this week, as NHS England data showed 39,142 hospital staff were absent for Covid-related reasons on last Sunday – up 59 per cent on the previous week and more than three times the number at the start of December.
Elsewhere on Sunday, former vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi strongly denied reports that the government is imminently planning to end the provision of universal free lateral flow tests – but he did make clear that ministers are preparing to treat the virus as part of the normal range of ongoing health problems rather than a national emergency.
“I hope we will be one of the first major economies to demonstrate to the world how you transition from pandemic to endemic and then deal with this for however long it remains - whether that’s five, six, seven or 10 years,” he told Sky News’s Trevor Phillips on Sunday show.
This sentiment was criticised by some scientists and doctors, including University College London professor Christina Pagel, who said that “learning to live with Covid” should “actually involve some learning”, such as making public spaces better ventilated, adding: “Pretending Covid is not a problem is not the same thing.”
It came after Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford accused the government of ignoring “what the science would have told them they should do” by refusing to introduce Covid restrictions.
But, predicting that the UK is “certainly not going to see a big rise in intensive care admissions and deaths”, leading Cambridge statistician Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter told Times Radio that cases “may have stabilised over the whole country” and that, after taking a “gamble”, Boris Johnson “may have got away with it, but we're going to have to see the next few weeks”.
This weekend, the number of people reported to have died in the UK within four weeks of testing positive for the virus exceeded 150,000 – although more than 174,000 death certificates have now mentioned the virus since the pandemic began.
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