Covid cases are rising again across the North East - and hospitalisations are beginning to trend upwards again with public health experts warning that the threat from the virus remains a potent one.
However, rates of Covid-19 remain substantially lower than during the peak of Omicron this winter, even in the areas showing the biggest rises now.
It is thought that a variant of Omicron dubbed "stealth" Omicron may be causing the uptick.
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As of March 5, Covid cases had risen in well over half of local areas in the North East compared to a week previously - with the worst affected area Cleadon and East Boldon in South Tyneside.
There, the case rate per 100,000 people over seven days has jumped back to 612.1.
However the rate is still below where it was a month ago - 909.4 - when it was announced that restriction would be ending.
The Government's "Living With Covid" strategy saw most restrictions disappear on February 24, while mass testing will no longer exist from April 1.
Local authority case rates
At local authority health meetings on Thursday, public health directors in Northumberland and Newcastle shared that case rates had hit 332 cases per 100,000 people in Newcastle, 399 in Northumberland and 283 for the wider North East.
Case rates began rising again in Newcastle for the first time since January 10 last week.
According to the latest publicly-available Government data the rate rose on March 3 and both of the days following.
Prof Eugene Milne, Newcastle’s director of public health, said earlier this week he was worried that “there is a feeling out there in a large part of the population that Covid is over, which I think is premature but it is changing people’s behaviour”.
On March 6, the Government figures show case rates in South Tyneside (236.2), Sunderland (266), Gateshead (235.2), North Tyneside (351.4) and County Durham (236.3) had all begun to rise again as February turned to March.
Hospitalisations
Across the area the number of Covid-positive patients has stopped falling, and in some places begun to increase again.
At the Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust it has hit 64 after being below 30 in late February.
The latest Government figures show 64 positive patients were in Northumbria on March 8, too - though that Trust's figure only fell as far as 49 on February 28
At the South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Trust there are still 84 Covid patients on the wards - and the figure has been relatively stable there since mid-February after an Omicron peak of around 200 over the second half of January.
In Gateshead, the figure had yet to rise on March 8, with there being 17 Covid patients in situ, while at the County Durham and Darlington NHS Trust there have been around 40 Covid patients each day during March so far.
Which areas are seeing spikes?
Of 251 medium super output areas (MSOAs) in the North East, 153 were seeing a March Covid-19 bump according to the Government data.
These are areas roughly analogous to postcode districts.
The biggest jumps were being seen in some areas of Newcastle and southern Northumberland.
Kenton and South Gosforth in Newcastle saw the two biggest week-on-week jumps in cases - each with 29 more in the seven days to March 5.
That meant that in Kenton there were 52 new cases and a rate of 451.6 and in South Gosforth there were 56 new cases and a rate of 586.2.
In addition to those two, the areas with the most new cases were North Gosforth, Blyth Town and Kingston Park & Dinnington which all had 57 over the previous seven days.
However, when accounting for population, the worst hit areas were Cleadon & East Boldon (612.1), Blyth Town (603.3), South Gosforth (586.2), Whitley Bay North (576.7) and Ashington South (571).
However, in every area rates of Covid are fractions of what they were during mid and late January.
The national picture
This week, responding to rises in cases around the country and figures from the Imperial College React-1 study which measures Covid prevalence showing an increase, Dr Jenny Harries of the UK Health Security Agency said: "These data confirm that cases have declined substantially following the peak of the Omicron wave.
"However, the increasing presence of the BA.2 sub-lineage of Omicron and the recent slight increase in infections in those over 55 show that the pandemic is not over and that we can expect to see Covid circulating at high levels."
She said getting vaccinated remained vital to protect the population from severe illness.
The latest findings from the React-1 study, covering February 8 to March 1 – round 18 of the study, show that prevalence in England during this period was 2.88%.
This was down on the 4.41% reported in round 17 covering January 5 to January 20 2022. However, it was also the second highest recorded rate of cases since the study began in 2020.
