Published Thursday 24 February 2022 at 10:24
Dominic Harrison; Director of Health and Wellbeing: Blackburn with Darwen Council
Covid case rates, hospitalisations and deaths continue to fall across most of the country. Blackburn with Darwen now has a case rate of 218 per 100,000, with Burnley, Hyndburn and Pendle also now well below a rate of 200 per 100,000. These rates are significantly below the regional and national average case rates and have fallen more rapidly from the Omicron peak in early January than most other local authority areas. This is probably due to the additional immunity conferred at the population level from a high cumulative case rate – that is the number of local residents who have previously had Covid. Increased resilience to future Covid waves may be an upside of having a high historic case rate in the first 18 months of the pandemic.
Covid hospitalisations in East Lancashire Hospitals Trust are also now down to 35, a big reduction from the Omicron hospitalisation peak of 182 on 11th January.
Nearly one third of all the new Covid cases in Blackburn with Darwen are reinfections – cases where people had already been infected before with either the original Covid Wuhan strain or Alpha or Delta variants, and have now been infected with Omicron. Reinfection is associated with either much milder symptoms or even an absence of symptoms. Those previously infected, and mostly now vaccinated, will mount a strong immune response. We expect the numbers of cases reinfected as a percentage of all new cases to increase week on week across the UK, and as a result, the numbers hospitalised as a percentage of all new cases to continue to fall.
The governments for both England and Scotland have announced their ‘Living with Covid’ strategies this week. In England, most of the measures that have been in place to control the spread of the virus during the pandemic will no longer be required by law. We will instead be required to take personal responsibility to ensure our actions minimise the risks of continued Covid transmission and protect the vulnerable. With a slightly more cautious approach, Scotland announced its own plan the day after England, promising to lift all legal restrictions on the 21st March.
The general consensus amongst many public health scientists and professionals is that whilst the pandemic risks are certainly reducing and the future is looking brighter, any implied message that the pandemic is now over is unhelpful, inaccurate and risky – particularly if we all rapidly return to pre-pandemic behaviours. The immediate relaxation of self-isolation controls, the restriction of PCR testing, the removal of free LFD testing, and new policies to charge for Covid tests will all present future risks.
The advice from Lancashire’s Directors of Public Health is that we should now move through a transition phase until Easter. For now, where possible, we should all try to keep up most of our current infection control behaviours – mask-wearing in shops and on public transport, testing and self-isolating when necessary, washing hands and ventilating rooms where possible.
ONS surveys suggest that about 4% of us were infected with Covid in early February. If Covid infection rates fall closer to 1% of the population by mid April, we should be able to safely relax some of these measures further.
My key message for now is that we are doing really well, but keeping up the current excellent progress in reducing Covid risks across Lancashire is going to depend on us all voluntarily ‘doing the right thing’ for a little while yet.