In the last month, Covid-19 rates have plummeted - but when April began the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron was rampant in our communities.
April 1 marked the first day without free mass testing for the virus, but the data shows how even with that caveat the virus has begun to subside in recent weeks. Hospitals - full and struggling at the beginning of the month and over the Easter weekend - are now seeing the number of positive cases on their wards fall too.
And though many people have been positive for Covid without being able to confirm this with a test, the latest estimates from the ONS and the ZOE Covid symptom study also show falls in cases.
Read more: Data shows at least 26,000 in England died during Omicron Covid-19 wave
This is how the latest phase of the pandemic has played out:
BA.2 is detected
The subvariant first began to cause concern as early as January - when the original Omicron wave was still causing huge numbers of infections. More than 400 cases had been found in the UK by January 22, and by mid-March, the subvariant had become dominant.
At that point, public health experts like Newcastle's departing director of public health had warned how the so-called "stealth Omicron" was causing an uptick in infections.
The BA.2 peak
In the North East, the week with the single most Covid-19 infections reported this spring was March 24. At that point there had been 608,940 new cases over a week - that meant the case rate was up to 907.8.
This was still below the peaks seen in early January due to the original Omicron variant - which saw 1.5m cases reported on a single day on January 4.
In our region, BA.2 hit slightly later than in the UK as a whole, and saw less new infections. The maximum level the case rate in the North East hit was 812.4. That was after 21,778 infections over the week to March 27.
In hospitals in our area, at this point medics were beginning to warn that a new wave hospitalisations was coming, but that had yet to begin in earnest. On March 24 there were 2,364 Covid-19 positive cases in hospital. This had risen sharply across March (from a low of 1,129), but would continue to grow through early April.
Ending testing and cases falling
Over the end of March the Covid-19 case rate begin to fall. This came as the public was aware of the approaching end of all Covid-19 restrictions on April 1 - and with it the end of free mass testing. This has seen the rate of testing, unsurprisingly, plummet, and with it the rate of positive cases. But other indicators, such as the ONS infection survey also show that Covid-19 infections appear to be falling fast.
That shows an estimate that just over 1.5m people had Covid in the week to April 30. That's substantially down on the week before when the estimate was 2.4m. At the start of April the figure was a massive 4.1m.
And as of April 30, case rates in every single postcode area in the North East are now below 400 per 100,000 people. That's an astonishing fall. Now, the North East total for confirmed cases over a week is just 4,229. Around a fifth of what we saw at the height of the wave.
The regional case rate is now just 157.8 - this is as low as we have seen since June 2021, though clearly the lack of free testing skews the figures. Across the second half of April hospitalisation figures have also fallen sharply too - to, on May 5, a figure of 1,468 positive patients on the wards in the North East and Yorkshire. There were as many as 2,783 sick with Covid in hospital on April 4.
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