Newsletters - October 2020

The impact of the coronavirus pandemic is continuing to put a huge financial strain on some people. Employment situations are changing rapidly and for some their income now no longer covers what they need, or they have lost their jobs completely. Help is available. If you, or someone you know, is worrying about money and how to pay for basic household essentials, please apply for extra assistance through funding that we have made available via your district council’s hardship fund.

Council Leaders from across the region have published a joint message this week; “Coronavirus doesn’t take a break – please respect and protect local communities.” It’s a message for anyone thinking of coming to or travelling in and around the south west this half-term. And it echoes the tone of a new social media campaign across the region that is specifically targeting people coming to the region.

The pattern in Exeter has shown a successful reduction in student cases with no sign of significant spread thanks to the swift actions of the university and other partners in working together to contain the situation. But we must not be complacent. We are now seeing more community cases in Exeter and across Devon, in line with the rise in the rest of the country, particularly in the working age population, and we expect cases to increase over the next few weeks. These cases cannot be linked to university students and the coronavirus appears to be passing between people outside of COVID-secure settings, which suggests that community spread is now occurring. Obviously, we want to limit the impact on people in older age groups and those who are particularly vulnerable so the time to act is now.

The government’s new three-tiered system of local COVID alert levels comes into force today in England. Devon is at ‘medium’ alert level. We’ve put together some information to help you understand what that means.

We are seeing cases in Devon rise generally as elsewhere in the country, but we are still lower than the national average for England though. In Exeter, the number of positive cases among the student population is going up significantly, but the number of cases among non-students are still fairly low, and is certainly below the England average. This gives us a high degree of confidence that we are not seeing significant spread from the student population to the non-student population in Exeter. If we think about a ‘ladder’ of interventions, and lockdown of Exeter being the top rung on the ladder, we are no where near the top yet. There are things that we can do in addition to the things that we are currently doing to help try to control that spread of the virus and hopefully avoid us getting towards the top rung of that ladder.

The latest figures show another rise in the number of COVID-19 tests provided in Devon. 10,900 tests (Pillar 2) were carried out during the week ending 25 September, a significant rise on the 7,600 test carried out during the previous week. Test resources had been diverted to other parts of the country where infection rates and demand for COVID-19 testing is higher. That had, for a time, left Devon residents struggling to book tests locally and quickly.