'Matter of time' before South African Covid found in Oxfordshire

Ansaf Azhar, the county’s director of public health, also said that case rates in the county were now decreasing thanks to lockdown measures introduced after Christmas.

However, he also warned the county’s rates were still higher than in November when the second England-wide lockdown began, and added the local death rate from Covid is likely to rise over the next week before falling again.

Meanwhile, Oxfordshire County Council’s Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee also heard that the vaccine rollout programme was continuing to gather pace, and a new testing regime was being put in place to help prevent the spread among key workers.

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Public health director Mr Azhar warned that new coronavirus variant first discovered in Kent in November had become the dominant version across the UK, and added this strain was much more infectious.

He said: “Even though the [infection] rates have come down it is still above the rates when we went to lockdown in November.

'Rates will go up'

“I just want to emphasise that if we relax now the rates will go up and it will not only go up, it will go up very fast because we have the new UK variant that is 70 per cent more transmissible and as a result of that if we relax now we could potentially find ourselves in a situation that is higher than the third peak.

“In some ways I am now more concerned that people think the rates are low and we can relax now, but we need to make sure this reduction continues further.”

But he added the impact of the third lockdown imposed after Christmas was now starting to have an effect, leading to a ‘de-escalation’ of the case rates in the Oxfordshire.

Official data shows that there were 2,045 cases across Oxfordshire in the week ending January 22, falling to 1,311 in the week ending January 29.

But Mr Azhar warned the committee that death rates would increase in the coming weeks, due to the lag of approximately four to six weeks between the peak of infections and deaths.

He also said hospitals had experienced a much more pressure on Covid beds during the second wave.

At the peak of the first wave on April 18 last year, there were 139 patients in hospital with Covid, while in a second peak during the winter this had ‘exceeded’ 300 patients in hospital.

According to the latest figures, 238 patients in Oxfordshire are currently occupying a Covid bed, and Oxford University Hospitals chief nurse Sam Foster said 72 patients were currently on mechanical ventilators.

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Mr Azhar added: “We may not see the proportion of deaths in the first peak because of the way we are treating people and doing things better.”

The public health director added that a strategy of ‘surge testing’ in areas where 11 cases of the South African variant of Covid had been discovered in the UK might be seen in Oxfordshire in the future.

He said: “The aim of this is to hamper this at an early stage so we can contain the spread at an early stage, but the reality is if we have 11 cases that is probably just the tip of the iceberg we may have a lot more cases.

“It is a matter of time before we are told we have a case and may need to do the same thing.“If we are to do this it is a massive undertaking and will involve a system level effort to do this in addition to the community level testing we are doing.”

Meanwhile, most Oxfordshire’s over-80s have been vaccinated once.

Tehmeena Ajmal, director of community services at Oxford Health, said approximately 90 per cent of those aged 80 plus had received their first dose of a Covid vaccine, although she was unable to give specific figures.

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She added ‘something like’ 90 per cent of care home residents had received the jab, as had 80 per cent of care home staff.

The vaccine programme was now making ‘inroads’ into the 70-plus age group she added.

And a new part of the local Covid testing programme is now being set up to cover keyworkers in specific groups.

Three testing centres using lateral flow tests will be set up in the Spiceball Leisure Centre, Banbury, the King’s Centre, Oxford, and The Beacon, Wantage.

The aim of the centres, opening on February 8, is to test police officers, firefighters, and nursery staff who still have to go to work, and prevent workplace outbreaks.

While testing capacity will begin at 4,000 a week, the centres could be administering 15,000 tests each week by mid-March to keyworker staff.

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