‘No obvious source’ of Leicester’s coronavirus outbreak, PHE report warns

There is “no obvious source” for the coronavirus outbreak in Leicester, a report from Public Health England has claimed.

The report said the increase in cases could be down to a “growth in availability of testing” in the area.

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Leicester has seen a surge in coronavirus infections over the last two weeks with 944 cases reported – leading it to become the first city placed under a local lockdown.

Restrictions due to be lifted on Saturday are being extended in Leicester for another two weeks, while non-essential shops and schools have closed.

Yesterday it was revealed that the Walker’s Crisps factory in the Beaumont Leys area of the city was home to 28 cases of Covid-19.

It was also revealed that the outbreak in the city started in food processing sites before making its way to clothing factories.

Reuters

Both the Samworth Brothers sandwich firm and Ethically Sourced Products clothes factory have been named as sites of minor outbreaks.

An investigation found that there are still sweatshops in Leicester packed full of workers earnings just £2.50 an hour.

Despite workers in factories continuing to work in “unsanitary conditions”, PHE found “no explanatory outbreaks in care homes, hospital settings, or industrial processes”.

The report highlighted that more “young and middle-aged people” in the city had tested positive than in other parts of the Midlands.

In a letter to The Lancet medical journal, the group of academics and clinicians wrote that the spike of regional infections had exposed “key problems” that need to be “urgently addressed”.

“In particular, the opportunity to escalate interventions locally has been stymied by the inadequacy of information sharing,” the letter said.

Data from the University of Cambridge yesterday however revealed that the whole of the Midlands was at risk of creeping above 1 on the R rate.

Also know as the reproduction number, the ‘R’ rate is used by the government to measure how coronavirus is spread by one infected single person.

The PHE report confirmed that there had been an increase in cases in the North Evington area of the city.

At present it claims there are 80 patients with Covid-19 who are receiving treatment on a ventilator.

 

 

It did however say that patient numbers had decreased rapidly since a surge in April.

Throughout June it said hospital admissions had remained steady between six and 10 patients per day.

Cases were “most marked” among the under 19 age group and the report said there was no link between children returning to school and the rise in cases.

The report did however claim that PHE would investigate this further.

The investigation found that since March there had been 3,216 Covid-19 cases in the city.

The majority of cases were discovered through hospital tests.

Since May the bulk of Leicester’s cases have been discovered through tests done outside of a hospital setting.

The report claimed that an increase in cases is due to the heightened availability of community testing.

Between 11-24 June 71 cases were found in hospitals and 873 were in the community.

The report concluded evidence for the scale of the outbreak was limited, but added the proportion of positives from PCR testing – the national standard for identifying new coronavirus cases – is rising.

“This is suggestive of a genuine increase in numbers of new infections, not simply an artefact of increasing test rates,” it added.