A member of NHS Test and Trace collects a sample from a member of the public (Andrew Matthews/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)Around 1 in 18 Londoners are estimated to have Covid, according to new figures, as the UK reported a further 90,349 cases on Friday.
Around 5.6 per cent of people in the capital had tested positive in the week ending March 12, according to the Office for National Statistics.
This is above the national estimate of 4.9 per cent but below the 6 per cent reported in the South East of England.
Around 2.7 million people in England had Covid in the week to March 12, the ONS said. This is up from 2.1 million the previous week and is the second week in a row that infections have increased.
In London, the borough of Sutton had the highest estimated number of cases with one in 13 residents infected. This was followed by Lambeth with one in 14 and Hammersmith & Fulham with one in 15.
Barnet, Barking & Dagenham, Brent and Bexley were among the boroughs with the lowest estimated infection rate, with one in 25 believed to have caught the virus in the week up to March 12.
Separate figures showed that the UK had recorded a total of 20,093,762 Covid infections – with over half a million reported in the past week.
It marks a 23 per cent rise on last Friday’s tally of 72,898 cases.
A further 126 fatalities were confirmed on Friday, taking the total to 163,511.
The number of patients in hospital has also seen a slight uptick, with 14,671 as of Thursday. However, this remains far below even the peak of the Omicron surge last winter with the figure standing at 20,047 on December 10.
Meanwhile, the number of patients in mechanical ventilation beds remains stable with 292 as of March 17. It marks a significant decrease from the 900 recorded on January 4.
Health experts have attributed the rise in cases to the growth of the BA.2 variant – a mutation of Omicron dubbed ‘Stealth Omicron’. The variant now accounts for the majority of infections across the country, the ONS said.
The ONS survey uses a representative sample of swab tests collected regularly from tens of thousands of households.
As a result, it is able to estimate the percentage of people likely to test positive for Covid at any one point in time, regardless of when they caught the virus.
Professor Paul Hunter, an infectious diseases expert at the University of East Anglia, said that cases would likely start to decline in April.
He told MailOnline: “Covid cases will likely peak next week or the week after that, but likely before the end of this month. We should then see quite a rapid fall like in the Netherlands and Denmark.”
