York Hospital is already as busy as it was during the Covid peak of last Christmas, fuelled by a “worrying” increase in cases among the over-65s, the city’s director of public health has said.
The Covid infection rate in the city is now higher than the regional and national average, though some other areas of Yorkshire do have higher rates.
The case rate for the city on Wednesday was 426.5 cases per 100,000 people – meaning there were about 900 new cases of Covid over the last week.
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The majority of new cases are in children and young people, Ms Stoltz told a meeting of the council’s health and wellbeing board, but there has been a “steady increase” in the number of cases in the over-65s.
She said: “That’s a concern because we understand that older people are more likely to have underlying health conditions that makes them more vulnerable to becoming seriously ill from Covid and requiring hospital admission.”
Ms Stoltz said she believed this could be down to “vaccine complacency” – whereby people think having the vaccine means they cannot get or pass on the virus, when this is not the case, and possibly waning immunity.
Upward trend
Ms Stoltz urged people who were eligible to get their booster jab.
She went on to explain that this rise may be the reason why York Hospital is so busy.
She added: “We haven’t seen the very rapid spike in admissions to hospital that we saw in earlier stages of the pandemic, but what we’re seeing is a very steady upward trend.
“When you look at the graph, we’re kind of where we were last Christmas, which is again a worrying trend and not where we would really want to be.”
Simon Morritt, chief executive of York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, told the meeting that the whole health system was under “significant pressure”.
He added: “We still have what I would consider to be high cases of Covid positive patients in our hospital – we hovered between 70 -80 patients for a number of weeks now across Scarborough and York, so three to four wards of patients that are occupying beds.
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“We have seen that as demand has crept back into the system that delays have started to grow within the hospital.”
The city is to launch a campaign with its partners called #YorkTogether, encouraging people to wear face masks, wash their hands and take tests even if they are symptom free.
Council staff have all been asked to work from home where they can.