Rotherham "turning the curve" of Covid cases despite rise of new variant
The town's new public health chief says lockdown is working
The new man in charge of public health for Rotherham says lockdown is working, despite more of the new Covid variant reaching the town.
Cases have now peaked and are on their way down, according to the new Director of Public Health Ben Anderson.
But he's told us around a third of cases are now the new more infectious strain of the virus.
Ben only took over as the town's new Director of Public Heath two weeks ago today, on the day the national lockdown was announced.
He says he's pleased the measures are starting to have an effect:
"We have peaked which is really good news. The cases are coming down and we're also seeing that shift and peak in the over 60s population which is important and sometimes lags a little bit behind the overall population.
"That's really positive because obviously they're the ones that are most likely to end up in hospital and are driving the current pressures on the NHS.
"We'll probably come out of lockdown with fewer cases overall but a greater proportion of them will be of the new variant.
"And that obviously means we've got that more tranmissible variant in the population so I think coming out of this lockdown will be different for us than coming out of the previous lockdown."
The new variant of coronavirus first emerged in London and the South East and fuelled a rapid rise in cases there but has spread across the UK.
Ben says there's been a rise in Rotherham but he thinks the lockdown will be enough to hold it:
"Pre-Christmas we were probably at around 1 or 2% of our cases were of the new variant. And that's been steadily rising up to now and we're probably now towards a third of our cases are of the new variant .
"My expectation is that the lockdown will have a bigger impact on the old variant than it does on the new variant.
"With the November lockdown in the South East and London, they didn't see that lockdown managing to hold where they had high proportions of the new variant.
"What we're seeing in Rotherham at the moment is that lockdown is having an effect and we are turning the curve so that does I think indicate that the measures are sufficient to make a difference."
Rotherham's case rate has now fallen below 300 per 100,000.
In the seven days to 11th January there were 753 new Covid cases, down from 865 the seven days before that.