'Please wear masks', says East Riding health boss
The county council’s public health lead has called on residents to wear masks and practice social distancing.
East Riding Council’s public health lead has called on residents to wear masks and practice social distancing, to help keep coronavirus infections down ahead of a “tough” winter for hospitals.
Public Health Director, Andy Kingdom, said he would recommend following coronavirus measures, as vaccines alone would not keep infection rates down.
Mr Kingdom added the movement of trends now depended on people’s behaviour, warning masks and distancing may return as requirements if infections rise.
It comes as the number of new coronavirus infections recorded in the East Riding fell from 1,564 between Wednesday, September 1 and Tuesday, September 7 to 1,078 the following week.
The seven day rolling rate fell from 456 to 314, per 100,000 people, during the same period.
The number of coronavirus patients in Hull Royal Infirmary and Castle Hill Hospital was 78 as of Friday, September 17.
The figures come as Mr Kingdom said the NHS faced mounting pressure from earlier than usual cases of seasonal illnesses emerging, due to lower than normal resistance in the population.
He added officials were braced for coronavirus case increases in October, leaving the elderly and clinically vulnerable at the greatest risk of being hospitalised, including those with two vaccines.
The director said:
“At the moment we’re facing a tipping point which hinges on whether people will take precautions against coronavirus voluntarily.
“If people rush back to pre-pandemic behaviours there’ll be more opportunities for infections to spread.
“It looks like a really big drop, but in the first week of September we were testing all the children who went back to school so we were finding cases we hadn’t before which inflated the figures.
“So it’s a downward trend, but the fall isn’t as big as it looks and we still need to wait to see what the impact of pupils returning to school will be on infection rates in the wider community.
“We saw the same issue in Scotland, when children there went back to school their numbers took off but ours haven’t yet.
“Infections could shoot up in October, even though the trend is downward at the moment we are expecting it to rise again it’s more a question of how high it will be.”
“At this point the case numbers are less significant than the hospitalisation rates because the NHS is under pressure not just from coronavirus patients but from more people coming in with illnesses we’d usually see in winter like flu and norovirus, as well as visiting A and E.
“That’s because people’s lifestyles have changed so much since the start of the pandemic so the resistance to those seasonal illnesses is weaker than it normally would be.
“And hospitals are still dealing with backlogs in procedures, so they’re facing a second wave of other pressures knocking on from coronavirus.”
Mr Kingdom said he would “absolutely” recommend that residents start wearing masks and distancing again while in public places.
He added officials were keen to avert a ‘Plan B’ of reintroducing requirements for face masks, social distancing and other restrictions.
The director said:
“If as many people as possible follow the guidance voluntarily then it puts a downward pressure on the numbers.
“But if the numbers rise significantly we might have to make it a requirement again.
“The vaccine can’t hold the numbers down on it’s own, the direction trends go in will depend on how people behave now.
“Otherwise Plan B would be to bring the measures back, people know what to do now it’s just a case of getting through a tough winter to spring when things will be more in our favour again.”