Deaths and test results

THREE (3) additional York Hospital Trust deaths announced today. One occurred on Saturday and two yesterday. The cumulative second wave fatality total for the York and Scarborough hospitals is now 45.

The Citywide figures for York shows an increase in the number of cases in the City. This is almost entirely down to the upward trend in Heslington.

Overall the number of cases in the City remains below the county, regional and national levels

However in five neighbourhoods levels are above the national average. They are Heslington, Fulford Road, Wigginton, Huntington and Poppleton. The latter two have risen quite quickly in recent days.

On the other hand, case numbers in the Westfield area have fallen during recent days

The government web site is claiming an additional 702 cases today. That is more than was recorded during the whole of the first wave peak.

It appears that the government has changed the way in which it records cases. It has retrospectively changed the figures back to the beginning of September (!). The daily new cases figure for today is therefore misleading.

This is what they say by way of justification.

From 16 November 2020, PHE has updated the way it records the location of people who test positive or negative for COVID-19. It now prioritises addresses given at the point of testing over the details registered on a patient’s NHS Summary Care Record. This better reflects the distribution of cases and testing.

However, it may give rise to differences in previously reported numbers of cases and rates in some areas. The change has been retrospectively applied to tests carried out from 1 September 2020, and data in the dashboard was updated to reflect this change on 16 November 2020. Due to reallocation of cases in this way, the number of cases reported by local authority may be artificially high or low on 16 November 2020.

The effect in York is quite dramatic. Instead of a cumulative case figure of 4555 we now see a figure of 5207. The 5000 case milestone was passed on 10th November. Looking back, the daily number of York positive test results peaked at 139 on 13th October.

The per 100k pop figure reached 449.9 a couple of days later.

More details can be found by clicking here

The following table and graphs reflect the new government supplied figures.

Given that tactical decisions on how to combat the spread of the virus have been taken based on the old figures, we think that some further explanation of this mistake should be made by the authorities.

“Close campus” call

The recent increase in Coronavirus case numbers in Heslington has led to renewed calls for the University campus to be closed. A York Councillor has written to the Director of Public Health suggesting that students should not return to the City after the winter break.

Instead they should pursue their course work via “on line” study.

It appears that student accommodation represents a particularly vulnerable transmission environment for the virus.

It now seems increasingly likely that a vaccine will be rolled out early next year. Students could then gradually return to the University after immunisation.

The move would be a bold one and might not be welcomed by some employed in student service and support industries. It may, however, be necessary if infection rates continue to rise.

It seems increasingly unlikely that the City could return to Tier 1 status on 3rd December as this could prompt an influx of visitors from more heavily infected areas.

Scarborough, with a rapidly increasing number of COVID cases, has already issued a “stay away” message to visitors.