As Covid cases continue to rise, health experts are advising people to stay vigilant and take precautions if they suspect they might have the virus. Recent data from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) reveals an increase in cases, prompting concerns.

Suruchi Sharma Diwan www.inyourarea.co.uk

According to the new figures released by released by UKHSA, 10.8 individuals per 100,000 of the population were diagnosed with the virus during the week ending on August 14. This represents an increase from 9.3 cases per 100,000 reported as of July 29.

Additionally, one in seven cases throughout the nation have been linked to the newly identified Eris variant, as instances of the virus surge across various age groups. As the transmission continues, medical experts have outlined several symptoms to be vigilant about.

The primary ones resemble the widely reported Omicron symptoms, including a sore throat, runny nose, blocked nose, sneezing, non-phlegmy cough, headache, phlegmy cough, hoarse voice, muscle discomfort and changes in sense of smell. However, shortness of breath, loss of smell and fever are no longer the predominant symptoms.

Instead, there are now three additional symptoms to be attentive to – diarrhea, skin rashes and eye irritation, as reported by New Scientist. The news comes as a health expert warned that Brits could face a new round of Covid jabs if Eris is shown to be resistant to the current vaccine, reported the Mirror.

Dr Bharat Pankhania, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter’s medical school, said: “It’s too early to say if this strain is more of a pathologic virus at the moment. I was first aware of new cases being reported about four weeks ago. This is not a UK-specific strain, there have been cases all around the world.”

He urged Brits to keep buildings well-ventilated and said masks may need to come back out if cases continue to rise. “People aren’t testing as much now and our guard is down because it’s summer,” he said.

“It’s important that people who are vulnerable get their vaccines if they haven’t already. We’re not in complete and total darkness this time – the old vaccine will still work, but if it’s found not to be giving the same coverage then it will need to be modified and given out again.”

According to Dr Pankhania, an expert in disease control and public health, it remains vital for individuals to stay current with their vaccinations. He noted that only time will reveal whether the latest vaccine will offer protection against Eris.

He said: “As new variants like this emerge we need to constantly keep up to date with modifying the vaccines to mirror them. This will be a forever ongoing process.

“The most recent vaccine was to combat the Omicron variant which is no longer in circulation. People need to understand what’s said one week may change the next – that is the nature of biology.”

A black hole in local authority budgets continues to grow, a BBC investigation reveals, prompting fears some will not be able to provide basic services.

[Many councils have continued to take risks on commercial investments to increase their income. E.g. Somerset Council bought more than £136m worth of retail property since the start of the pandemic, including a B&Q in Ayr and a Wickes in Birmingham.]

By Pilar Tomas and Paul Lynch www.bbc.co.uk

The average council now faces a £33m predicted deficit by 2025-26 – a rise of 60% from £20m two years ago.

Unison said the situation meant some councils would not be able to offer the “legal minimum of care” next year.

The government said decisions on the funding beyond the next financial year had not yet been made.

The BBC’s Shared Data Unit surveyed 190 upper-tier authorities in the UK to find out the extent of the financial difficulties facing town halls, which provide services from adult social care to bin collections and pothole repairs.

It revealed council chiefs expect to be £5.2bn short of balancing the books by April 2026 even after making £2.5bn of planned cuts.

At least £467m will be stripped from adult care services, which include elderly care homes, respite centres and support services for people with disabilities.

This year, councils are closing leisure centres, reducing care packages and raising fees for services like waste collection and parking in order to break even.

Unison’s head of local government Mike Short said town halls were in the “direst of states”.

“This is not a sustainable situation,” he said.

“Local authorities simply don’t have the funds to provide even statutory services.”

Councillor Shaun Davies, who chairs the Local Government Association (LGA), said inflation, the introduction of the National Living Wage, energy costs and increasing demand for services were adding “billions of extra costs just to keep services standing still”.

‘Everyone is horrified’

Gateshead Leisure Centre was opened in 1981 by Queen Elizabeth and featured a pool, a soft play and a gym, as well as badminton and basketball courts.

But in November 2022, Gateshead Council recommended closing it, claiming it had no other choice “after government cuts”.

The centre, which had more than 480,000 visits a year and served an area with high levels of deprivation, closed in July. A community bid is being put together to raise £40,000 and take over the site – but so far it has raised £5,000.

Mental health worker Layla Barclay, 39, from Bensham, led the campaign to keep it open.

“Everyone is just horrified it’s actually come to this,” she said. “There is a lot of anger towards the council. We just feel that they didn’t come to the community until it was too late.”

A pool has existed at the Alexandra Road site since 1941 and Wendy Arkle, 64, remembers first using it in the late 1960s as part of a Brownies swimming gala.

“There is just this huge void now,” she said.

‘Unprecedented’ savings

Our investigation found on top of cuts, town hall chiefs are expected to use up £1.1bn of reserves to balance the books this year.

Bradford Council said the authority was using reserves at an “unprecedented level” while Leicester City Council said it was going to run out during the next financial year.

Several councils have called for financial support from the government. Among them Slough, Croydon, Thurrock, Kensington and Chelsea, and newly created Cumberland and Westmorland and Furness councils will share around £393m in government funding this year.

Thurrock declared bankruptcy in December 2022 after a series of failed solar farm investments saw the council run up a £500m deficit – one of the largest ever reported for a council of its size.

Slough was also forced to effectively declare bankruptcy after borrowing more than £700m to buy land and properties.

The £51.8m being given to Kensington and Chelsea is to help pay the compensation due to the survivors and first responders of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. In a statement, the council said it had “healthy finances” and had frozen council tax this year.

Meanwhile other large councils have indicated being in financial distress.

Birmingham City Council, Europe’s largest local authority, halted all non-essential spending in June after announcing it was facing a bill for a £760m unequal pay claim.

The £51m of savings being made at Shropshire amount to a fifth of its overall budget this year – the highest proportion for any council in the UK.

A spokesman for the council said its financial position had been compounded by its “rural nature and sparse population,” which it said made it “more expensive to provide services like social care”.

Councils are funded through a mix of council tax, business rates, income from services like parking and social housing rent, as well as money from the government known as the Revenue Support Grant.

That funding declined by nearly a third between 2010 and 2021, according to the Public Accounts Committee, which found council income was £8.4bn lower in real terms than it had been a decade before.

Its chair Meg Hillier said the BBC study showed councils were at a “tipping point” where “only so many more savings” could be made.

Ms Hillier, the Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, said: “These findings should have the dashboard flashing red across the board for the Government.”

Despite high profile failures, many councils have continued to take risks on commercial investments to increase their income.

A Freedom of Information request by the BBC found Somerset Council had bought more than £136m worth of retail property since the start of the pandemic, including a B&Q in Ayr and a Wickes in Birmingham.

Analysis by Alex Forsyth, BBC Political Correspondent

Stories about pressure on council budgets may not seem new. Local authorities were hit hard during the period of austerity.

The government has made more money available to councils in recent years, but rising prices and the cost of delivering services for which there’s growing demand means budgets remain squeezed. This research shows the future looks bleak for some authorities who have already cut back on what they offer local communities.

Questions have been raised over investment decisions some councils have made, but beyond that there’s a wider call for a rethink of the way local government is funded, to try and break what seems to be a cycle of pressure on the services on which so many people rely.

Disability care cuts

Neil Crouch, from Harlow in Essex, has motor conversion disorder, severe arthritis and suffers from kidney disease.

Essex County Council, which is set to save £36m this year, cut the 48 hours of weekly funded social care he received down to 42, and removed his eligibility for respite care.

Previously, he was allowed two funded weeks a year at a centre that provides holidays for people with disabilities.

“It’s such a shame,” said Neil, who is becoming increasingly immobile and relies on carers and his elderly parents for support. “It helps so much to have that respite care.

“My mum and dad are both in the mid seventies now, and it’s getting hard for them. It’s not an easy process to look for after somebody with a disability.”

Neil, who said many others like him are suffering from having their respite eligibility removed, is urging councils to rethink such cuts.

“They have holidays,” he said. “Because we are disabled does it mean we’re not entitled?”

Essex County Council said, while it could not comment on individual cases, it still offered “significant support” to people needing respite care in the area.

Currently, councils discover how much money they are going to receive from the government one year at a time.

The LGA has repeatedly called on the government to change the way local authorities are funded. It has said multi-year settlements would give councils more clarity to plan effectively.

A plan to allow councils to retain 75% of the business rates they collect instead of the current 50% was paused indefinitely in 2021.

A Department of Levelling Up Housing and Communities spokesman said that, as no decision on council funding levels would be taken until the Spending Review next year the predicted deficit figures for 2025-26 were “unsupported”.

He said the government had pledged to make £4.7bn available for the adult social care system in England in 2024-25 and confirmed there would be an increase in the Revenue Support Grant councils receive.

The Scottish and Welsh governments said they had increased resources for councils this financial year. The government of Northern Ireland declined to comment.

Additional reporting: Lauren Woodhead

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In their haste to react to this heart wrenching case, has the Government failed to read the mood of the country or understand the gravity of the issues raised,  offering only a toothless “fudge”? – Owl

[A non-statutory inquiry does not have the power to compel witnesses to provide evidence or production of documents and must rely on the goodwill of those involved to share their testimony.]

Mark Dowling www.chesterstandard.co.uk

LAWYERS representing families of some of the babies attacked by serial killer Lucy Letby have said that a non-statutory public inquiry into her killing spree is “inadequate”.

Ministers ordered an independent inquiry after Letby, 33, was convicted of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of six more during her shifts on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016.

But Slater and Gordon, which is representing two of the families involved, said that a non-statutory inquiry “is not good enough” and needs to have a “statutory basis to have real teeth”.

“The inquiry announced by the Department of Health is inadequate,” said Richard Scorer, head of abuse law and public inquiries, and Yvonne Agnew, head of the firm’s Cardiff clinical negligence department, in a joint statement.

“As a non-statutory inquiry, it does not have the power to compel witnesses to provide evidence or production of documents and must rely on the goodwill of those involved to share their testimony.

“This is not good enough.

“The failings here are very serious and an inquiry needs to have a statutory basis to have real teeth.”

It comes after Samantha Dixon, Labour MP for Chester, also raised concerns about a non-statutory inquiry.

“I do have some concerns about the risks around a non-statutory inquiry in that people are not obliged to attend and to give evidence,” she told BBC Breakfast.

“So I have replied to him and asked him why he has come to that decision, given that there are these risks and that we need full answers.”

She added: “A non-statutory inquiry almost relies on the goodwill of witnesses to attend. They are not obliged to attend, they’re not compelled to attend.”

Meanwhile hospital bosses have been ordered to adhere their whistleblowing policies after it emerged that numerous staff raised concerns about the actions of the nurse as she conducted a year-long killing spree.

NHS England wrote to hospital leaders across the country following the verdict to remind them to remind them of “the importance of NHS leaders listening to the concerns of patients, families and staff, and following whistleblowing procedures, alongside good governance, particularly at trust level”.

The letter added: “We want everyone working in the health service to feel safe to speak up – and confident that it will be followed by a prompt response.”

It comes as Dr Ravi Jayaram, one of the doctors who raised concerns over Letby’s behaviour, said that whistleblowers are “not only being ignored but then being portrayed as the problem”.

He added: “There needs to be fundamental change in the culture and governance of NHS institutions and it should start right now.”

Dr Jayaram called for managers involved in the case, who are “still earning six figure sums of tax-payers money or retired with their gold-plated pensions”, to “stand up in public to explain why they did not want to listen and do the right thing, to acknowledge that their actions potentially facilitated a mass-murderer and to apologise to the families involved in all of this”.

Sheila Sobrany, president of the Royal College of Nursing, also called into question whether Dr Jayaram “would have been listened to if he was white”.

She wrote on Twitter: “If we are going to learn anything from this case we need to stop denying that racism is a serious issue in the NHS, this doctor would have been listened to if he was white and Lucy Letby would have been stopped sooner if she wasn’t white.

“This was a serious safeguarding issue that compromised the lives and well-being of babies and subsequently their parents.

“Dr Ravi Jayram was not listened to or taken seriously.”

Meanwhile Slater and Gordon also called for the Government’s inquiry to investigate how the NHS’ duty of candour scheme had “failed”.

Mr Scorer and Ms Agnew added: “An inquiry also needs to look at why the NHS’s ‘duty of candour’ seems to have failed in this case, with hospital managers seemingly prioritising the hospital’s reputation above child safety.

“We do not believe that ‘duty of candour’ is an adequate substitute for a proper mandatory reporting regime, and any inquiry needs to examine this issue properly as failings here could be replicated elsewhere in the NHS”.

It comes as police said they are reviewing the care of 4,000 babies who were admitted to the Countess of Chester – and also Liverpool Women’s Hospital when Letby had two work placements – going as far back as 2012.

The families of her victims have said they have been left “heartbroken, devastated, angry and feel numb” by her actions.

But is expected they will not see Letby when she is sentenced on Monday after the serial killer has indicated she will not take part in the hearing at Manchester Crown Court.

Former Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust chief executive Tony Chambers, who was in charge at the time, said he would co-operate “fully and openly” with the inquiry.

Dr Nigel Scawn, medical director at the Countess of Chester Hospital, said in a statement on Friday: “Since Lucy Letby worked at our hospital, we have made significant changes to our services and I want to provide reassurance to every patient that may access our services that they can have confidence in the care that they will receive.”

But he walked away without answering as a journalist asked: “Why did hospital managers try to stop Lucy Letby from being investigated?”

More: There are other reports of calls being made by a key prosecution witness for an investigation into corporate manslaughter; and that police should also investigate the [hospital] in relation to criminal negligence. – Owl