Health bosses in Newcastle think the city may be "over the Omicron peak", but have warned that schools and social care settings are still seeing "challenging" outbreaks of the dominant Covid-19 variant.
Speaking at a meeting of Newcastle City Council's City Futures Board, the city's director of public health Professor Eugene Milne explained that, on Tuesday, the rate of Covid positive cases was down to 1,371 per 100,000 over seven days - and on "a downward trend".
Later, Caroline Docking - assistant chief executive at the Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust - said the number of Covid-19 patients on the city's wards seemed to have peaked too, and she said staff absence had also fallen.
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Prof Milne told the meeting: "If we're just looking at where we are overall, across a longer period of time, you can see that we do look to have peaked and then fallen. Some of that could be as a consequence of changing behaviour but I think it's probably real because of what we're seeing across the other data."
He said though changes to the rules around testing - you no longer need a PCR test to confirm a positive Covid lateral flow test result - may have influenced part of the fall in the data showing a reduction in positive cases, he felt other metrics showed that it was a "genuine" one and that Omicron was a "really a very, very different kind of disease than we've seen before".
"As you will know, the change in the testing regime could be having an impact," he said. "But I think that because we're seeing stability or a fall in [hospital] bed occupancy, because we have also seen fall in demand on the test and trace service, because that's falling I think that it's genuine."
However, Prof Milne said the latest data showed a "slightly troubling" rise in cases among the under-15s, and added: "We are seeing a lot of outbreaks at the moment in social care settings and in schools - not surprisingly given the infectivity of Omicron."
Ms Docking added that the number of Covid-19 patients in hospital had fallen too.
She said: "We've seen, we think, that we have peaked last week. We were seeing around about 150 patients with Covid in our wards.
"This week that's more like 135 and looks to be heading in the right direction. That's really positive. And again although we've seen an increase overall, the numbers of people who are very unwell needing intensive care stayed around about the same - each week we've had around about 10 people or less, a really positive picture."
She said that while the widely-publicised high-levels of staff sickness due to Omicron had hit hard - "that's improving as well".
Ms Docking said: "We were up to around probably over 11% of staff who were absent at one point couple of weeks ago. That position has improved really dramatically, but we're still finding - because of the amazing ability of this variant to spread - that people are still needing to isolate."
At the meeting health bosses continued to urge members of the public to take up the "evergreen" Covid-19 vaccine.
Jackie Cairns - director of strategy at Newcastle Gateshead CCG - added that the vaccination programme continued and around 73% of eligible people had taken up the offer of their booster jab so far.
She also said progress had been made reaching "vaccine-hesitant or hard-to-reach groups" in recent weeks - particularly in Elswick and Walker.
