GRAPHS shows how coronavirus cases have surged across Dorset since the Christmas and New Year period – as a spike in cases were blamed by visitors to the county.
Public Health England reports that between Monday, December 21, 2020 and Friday, February 11, 2021, Dorset Council recorded 6,703 cases while Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council area reported 15,178 cases. In total, 21,881 cases across the county were confirmed.
Public Health England say this data, which is used in this article, is presented by specimen date, namely the date when the sample was taken from the person being tested.
At the start of this period before December 25, 2020, case numbers were below 100 in the Dorset Council area, while positive tests in the BCP Council area were below 190 cases.
Following a dip on Christmas Eve and Day, possibly explained by a delay in testing, cases in both areas begin to rise.
During this time period, the most cases recorded in one day in the Dorset Council area were 227 on both Monday, January 4 and Tuesday, January 5.
Meanwhile, in the BCP Council area, 624 people tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday, January 5.
After the peak of these cases, the number of positive tests remained high in both areas for approximately two to three weeks.
Following this period, Public Health England stated coronavirus hospital admissions soared past 500 across the county, more than three times as many as the peak in the first wave.
Cases across Dorset started to fall in late-January as the transmission of coronavirus started to fall in the area.
The highest number of coronavirus cases reported in Dorset Council area so far in February was 138 on Monday, February 1 while 197 people tested positive on Tuesday, February 2 in the BCP Council area.
The spike in coronavirus cases came as county’s director of public health, Sam Crowe, says there is evidence that incoming visitors, from areas where travelling was not allowed, may have contributed to a rise in cases, in addition to the permitted Christmas visits.
He told an online meeting on Tuesday, February 9 that outbreaks at schools, care home and more recently Guy’s Marsh and the Verne prisons, had kept staff busy trying to contain the spread of Covid across the area, but much of the transmission continued to take place in households.
The director said that the rapid rise of cases in the BCP area was similar to the surge seen in London and the South East, although was less marked in the more rural Dorset Council area.
He said: “The role of in-bound travel played its part.
“The working hypothesis is that because we were in a different tier than London and other parts of the South East there was a lot of in-bound travel just before the Christmas period and, along with the social mixing allowed over the holiday period, that led to a window where our cases transmitted much more quickly than we anticipated and we had the subsequent rise in infections.”
He said that more analysis of that period had been requested as that it could feed into the debate about how to lift lockdown measures safely.
Professor Alastair Hutchison, chief medical officer at Dorset County Hospital, also felt that an increase of coronavirus cases in Dorset was due to visitors from outside of the area.
He said: “I think that visitors, depending on where they come from, are quite likely to increase the number of cases because so many people are asymptomatic and consequently, don’t know they have Covid and can spread it.
“I think that did happen at Christmas.”
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