Complacency warning despite falling Covid cases in Walsall
People in Walsall have been warned over Covid-19 complacency despite data showing a fall in cases
New figures showed that two people had died from Covid in the last week of March.
Experts speaking to the Walsall local outbreak engagement board on Tuesday said this was a huge reduction from the worst periods of the outbreak earlier in the year.
But health bosses said they are planning ahead in case there are future surges as the roadmap sees restrictions being lifted over the coming weeks and months.
Emma Thomas, from Walsall Public Health, said there had been 122 positive cases identified in the seven days up to April 9 and an overall rate of 42.7 per 100,000 population.
The total of number of positive cases recorded in the borough, since the start of the pandemic up to April 9, is 25,567.
It was also revealed at the meeting that the over-60s cohort is at a rate of 15 per 100,000 which was attributed to the roll-out of the vaccination programme.
Since last March, Walsall has seen a total of 833 deaths as a result of Covid with two recorded in the week up to April 2 – far lower than the peak levels at the start of the year. In the week up to February 5, 60 lives were lost.
Vaccine
Mrs Thomas said: “Cases are coming down, which is really encouraging and testing is available. In the early days, we didn’t have such community testing available and the vaccine roll-out is doing great guns.
“All of these are impacting with hospital admissions coming down and deaths coming down.
“We can see when the peaks were, such as in January when we had a significant rise in deaths, but now in April they have come down significantly.
“It is still two deaths too many as we want to make sure that’s a zero but it’s a lot lower than what we had experienced in the earlier part of the year.
“We need to be mindful of the younger age groups. We are in the Easter holiday period. When the children start to go back to school, we need to maintain that surveillance and encourage them to take up the testing as part of their routine at school.”
Walsall public health consultant Dr Uma Viswanathan said they were still planning ahead for issues such as winter surges, addressing long term Covid health problems and responding to new variants.
She said: “We take this virus for granted at our peril.
“One of the important things we are looking at doing is planning for a potential winter surge.
“Like everybody else, I hope it doesn’t happen but we want to make sure we have everything in place either because of variants of concern or any other reason and we need to plan for that.”
