Sunderland's coronavirus infection rate begins to fall

New figures from Public Health England show how case numbers have changed in the first days of the year.

The latest weekly rate data released yesterday, Thursday, January 14, covers the seven days up to Saturday, January 9, and shows there were 1,277 new cases confirmed in the previous seven days, the equivalent of 459.8 infections for every 100,000 people in the city.

That is a fall of on the 1,334 new cases confirmed in the week running up to New Year’s Day, when the weekly rate was 480.4 new cases per 100,000.

The weekly case rate peaked in the city on January 4, the day lockdown measures were announced, when it stood at 577.6 per 100,000

The highest number of new cases confirmed in a single day was 273, on January 4. On Thursday January 14 there were 102.

Medical experts had warned the easing of the restrictions imposed under the Government’s three tier system of virus alert might lead to a new spike in infections at a time of year when hospitals were already stretched.

Their concerns eventually led Ministers to scale back a planned five-day lifting of the regulations to only allow people to mix indoors on Christmas Day itself.

And the rapid spread of the new variant of the disease saw Prime Minister Boris Johnson announce a third national lockdown on January 4.

A leading scientist has warned that although infections has peaked in the UK, deaths and hospital admissions have not yet reached their peak.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter of the Statistical Laboratory at Cambridge University said the lockdown measures were having an impact, with the peak in infections having passed “a good few days ago”, however coronavirus deaths are likely to peak in the next week to 10 days.

“They are likely to level off in a week – 10 days maybe – at a peak which is probably going to be bigger than the first wave peak of 1,000-a-day, but then should decline due the reductions in cases that we are seeing and, of course, the vaccine programme,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The World At One.

He warned, however, that hospital admissions would fall more slowly.

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