Health chief expects Northumberland to remain in Tier 3 amid fears of third wave of infections

Public health consultant Dr Jim Brown also told Northumberland County Council’s health and wellbeing board that he thinks it is unlikely that there will be a move out of the highest tier three restrictions when it is reviewed later this week.

His comments, at a meeting on Thursday, December 10, came the day before Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the issue during his visit to Blyth, saying: “We’ll do our best on the 16th, we’ll be as fair as we possibly can, but we can’t afford to let the virus get out of control.”

Dr Brown told councillors and health partners that there were a range of factors that were raising alarm bells in relation to another spike in Covid-19 infections.

“We have a concern about a reduction in testing in the run-up to Christmas if people are perceiving that they don’t want to have to self-isolate if they end up having a positive test,” he said.

“The campaign (BeatCovidNE.co.uk with its key message being one of thanks to people in the region) hopefully will counter that and we want to encourage anyone with symptoms to get tested. The turnaround is really pretty rapid – within a day – for those who attend.

“We are concerned about the Christmas bubble, the relaxation of restrictions and mixing of households.

“I think it’s extremely important for our residents, but that mixed with the extended hours of shops, increased footfall and maybe some complacency because of the vaccine, we are particularly concerned about an increase throughout December.

“We don’t yet know the impact of the move out of national lockdown, but many of us are concerned about a potential increase throughout December and into January. What we don’t want to see is a yo-yoing between tiers, which would have a particularly harmful impact on business.”

Reflecting on how we got to this point, he noted that there was a ‘plateauing’ in cases after the additional North East restrictions were introduced.

He continued: “That was stable through October until we hit half-term and the announcement of lockdown, and we think those two things in terms of the behaviours associated with them, triggered a substantial increase which peaked between November 2 and 9, and by then of course we had entered the national lockdown.

“We have then subsequently initially seen a steep decrease, but it’s a mixed picture.”

One of the notable shifts has been the change in geography, with the ‘fantastic news’ being that numbers have dropped in south-east Northumberland which has ‘borne the brunt’ up until now.

However, he added that in ‘a macabre type of whack-a-mole’, it has now risen in the west, with Haltwhistle the hardest hit – probably higher than anywhere in the county throughout this second wave – but also the Haydon and Hadrian ward, and Corbridge.

Dr Brown also reported that there has been a reduction in the number of cases in schools recently, that testing is relatively stable – with positivity rates coming down quite steeply, but that there have been a number of large outbreaks in care homes, particularly in the Ashington area; ‘thankfully that’s reducing in terms of the number of new notifications in the last week’.

The dramatic events of 2020 are having a major impact on many of our local valued advertisers and consequently the advertising that we receive. We are now more reliant than ever on you helping us to provide you with news by buying a copy of our newspaper. If you can, please do pick up a copy when you are at the shops. Thank you for your support.