DORSET'S public health boss has called on people to ‘remain vigilant’, as the county sees rising numbers of Covid cases once again.

As of March 17, the BCP conurbation had 765 cases per 100,000 and 859 cases per 100,000 in Dorset council, these figures are similar to the south west as a whole which has 869 per 100,000, with England below that at 615.

Sam Crowe, director of public health for Dorset and BCP Councils, said: “It’s quite different today compared with the past couple of weeks, we are seeing a bit of a rise in the numbers, the south west is definitely experiencing a surge at the moment.

“My public health advice will always be that even though the legal requirement to self isolate has gone it’s still really important that people self isolate and don't spread it about, so if you think you've got any of those symptoms of Covid you shouldn't be going into work and you shouldn’t be mixing with other people, even if you haven't had a positive test, avoid spreading it if you can.”

Looking to the future, Mr Crowe says we will reach a point where infection rates will start to fall.

He said: “I expect we'll go into the late spring and the summer with a much lower level of infection and the only thing that will change that is if we've got a different variant that comes along that the vaccines don't offer as much protection against and then we could be back into seeing another wave of infections.”

For now, Mr Crowe says there are no signs of that and they are not aware of any other variants but he is asking the public to remain alert.

He said: “We do have to remain really vigilant and that’s going to be more of a challenge when access to mass testing is rolled back and we have to rely much more heavily on some of the national surveillance mechanisms to make sure that we are able to detect a change quickly.

“I would hope if we saw any signs that the waves were becoming more serious and causing more serious disease then very quickly we'd be rethinking our policy and perhaps going back to something that resembled some of the actions that we were standing up previously.

"But I'm hoping that we'd never go back to the situation where we'd need to lockdown society again, we should be able to manage this now with the level of vaccination in the population.”