Birmingham City Council’s dashboard of Covid-19 information for the week 23rd – 29th January 2021 can be seen here. There are signs that the impact of the national lockdown is bringing down case numbers: all wards in the city have seen case numbers fall between this week and the week before, but the scale of this drop varies a lot between wards. Encouragingly, Moseley has seen a 50% decrease in cases since the previous fortnight.
However, there is still a long way to go to bring the case rate down to the levels we achieved back in the autumn where case rates were down below 200 cases/100,000 people. The average daily Covid admissions to hospitals across the city are still stable at around 150 new cases a day. Pressure on the NHS remains very high and although there are positive signs of case rates improving, this won’t impact on pressures in the NHS for three to four weeks. Case rates have fallen slightly in all age groups but remain highest in the 30-44yrs age group.
A small number of cases of the South African variant of COVID-19 have been discovered in the Frankley Great Park ward and parts of south Northfield. The Council is working closely with Public Health England and the national NHS Track and Trace team to increase testing in those areas.