A new report reveals the devastating effect the coronavirus pandemic has had on North Tyneside.
Variants, Volunteers and Vaccines – the Director of Public Health’s Annual Report - charts the borough’s journey through the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022. It reveals that up until January 31 this year, 65,277 people had tested positive for Covid-19 over the course of the pandemic in North Tyneside – with 580 sadly losing their lives.
There were around 600 outbreaks of Covid 19 reported up to January 31, 40% of which occurred in schools, 22% in care homes with the rest spread over a large number of settings. The highest number of daily cases was 1,244 on January 4 this year, and the highest number of monthly deaths occurred in May 2020 when 86 died.
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The stark figures come exactly two years to the day since the announcement of the first national UK-wide lockdown and as Covid cases are once again rising across the region. Figures for the week ending March 17 show there were a total of 15,668 Covid-19 cases - a rate of 584.5 per 100,000 people.
In her foreword to the annual report, North Tyneside’s Director of Public Health, Wendy Burke, said: “The pandemic has had a profound impact on every aspect of our lives – how we work, how we travel, how we spend our leisure time, how our children have been educated and it has also significantly impacted on the experience of birth, death, illness and loss.”
She said the impact had not been felt equally across North Tyneside’s communities. “Rates of infection, subsequent illness and death, and the impact of the mitigation measures and national restrictions have disproportionately affected our more disadvantaged communities.”
She said the period of the pandemic “has been the most challenging of all my career, facing the biggest global health threat for a generation as a Director of Public Health is not something I ever anticipated”.
The first Covid case in North Tyneside was reported on March 8, 2020., according to the report. Thereafter, cases across the borough gradually increased reaching a peak in April that year with an average of 25 per day.
By mid-April 2020, Northumbria Health Foundation Trust admissions of patients with Covid-19 averaged 3.3 per day. There was an average of two deaths per day.
The report also discloses that over the course of the three national lockdowns and varying restrictions, North Tyneside Council supported more than 4,000 businesses with £65m in funding. The council also provided over 185,000 packed lunches to children across the borough when schools were closed.
The highest number of Covid-19 hospital admissions came in January 2021 with 146, putting the “NHS nationally and locally...under extreme pressure caused by Covid-19 admissions, winter illness, Covid-19 restrictions and staff absences.”
The area’s first rapid testing site opened at the Riverside Children’s Centre on January 18, 2021, with 942 tests carried out in its first week. Following the introduction of the national vaccine programme, the 100,000th was administered in North Tyneside to Barbara Lancaster, 76, from Whitley Bay, on April 10 last year.
As the legal restrictions for Covid 19 have been lifted by the Government, Ms Burke said the new challenge is how we learn to live safely with the virus and respond to any variants and subsequent surges in infection rates. She said: “We have learned a great deal in this period; about the virus, the wide-reaching impact and our ability to respond quickly and effectively across organisational boundaries.
“Our challenge now is how we take what we know and have learned and move forward together.”
