ANOTHER sharp increase in people being admitted to Airedale Hospital suffering from Covid-19 has been seen over the past week.

Today's weekly meeting of North Yorkshire County Council's Local Resilience Forum heard the situation in the county's hospitals is extremely challenging with significantly more Covid patients in hospital than last week with numbers trending upwards.

The total numbers in North Yorkshire yesterday (Tuesday) was 471, with 51 of those in intensive care. This is169 more than in the peak of wave one.

On top of this there were 63 patients being treated in a Darlington hospital and 88 Covid patients being treated at Airedale yesterday. Last week at Airedale that figure was 62 and the previous week it was 31.

According to data received today from Airedale NHS Trust, a total of 207 patients who tested positive for the virus have died at the hospital since the pandemic began.

Amanda Bloor, chief accountability officer with North Yorkshire Clinical Commissioning Group said: "As you can see these are not small numbers in terms of increase so it remains challenging for our colleagues. They all remain really busy.

"The increasing demand of Covid patients has a knock-on for other hospital services so all the trusts are having to postpone services and reschedule services so they need to redeploy both staff and facilities across their sites and reconfigure how they operate to meet that rising demand of Covid patients.

"All the hospitals have their full escalation plans in place; this is standard procedures for NHS hospitals particularly through winter to manage any increase in demand. Plans are in full swing and include wider partners in the hospitals so working with community services and local authority services particularly focusing on how we move patients appropriately through the hospital and out back home or into community settings. The increase and the demand of Covid positive patients has that direct impact on the availability of services for other people who may need them and it is imperative that we protect NHS services for everyone. We would still urge everyone across North Yorkshire to follow the guidance and stay home when they can and only leave your home if it's an essential journey.

"Please do not attend A&E unless it's an emergency. We are hearing that there are still patients attending at emergency. If you don't need to be in hospital please do not go to hospital and also don't attend A&E if you think you might have a positive Covid test or if you have minor symptoms. Please use NHS 111 to access medical help that way.

"The good news is that the number of community cases are starting to plateau and indeed drop in some areas and that is really good. But as we've seen in previous peaks what we know in number of patients presenting into hospital lag for about seven to 14 days after the community prevalence starts to plateau and decline so we potentially do have a number of days, possibly a week or so where we may see numbers needing admission to hospital continuing to rise. So although the peak may be approaching from an NHS perspective we don't think it's here yet.

"The single biggest factor for the NHS at the moment is to reduce community transmission and the number of people in our community catching Covid."

Richard Webb, director of health and adult services with North Yorkshire Council speaking about care settings said there were 76 out of 200 care settings which had one or more Covid diagnoses. He said there were nine settings with large outbreaks of more than 10 or more cases and that over all the care settings there were 258 residents and staff with Covid-19.

North Yorkshire Police chief inspector Charlotte Bloxham said 90,000 people had now died of the disease and said putting it into context it was the equivalent to the population of Selby, a full crowd at Wembley Stadium or around half the number of festival goers to Glastonbury.

She said people needed to follow the rules to slow the spread.

"Many people do understand the seriousness, however, there is a stubborn minority who do not believe the rules apply to them and we will use enforcement action against them," she said.

She added that since January 6 North Yorkshire Police issued 241 fixed penalty notices for lockdown breaches, 134 of these in the last week and 79 over the last weekend.

In Craven seven FPNs were issued in the last week for being outside a place of living.

Ms Bloor added that 4.2 million vaccines had been administered across England to date, with 705,000 of those administered across the North East and Yorkshire. Of these, 634,000 were first doses and around 70,000 second doses.

A progress report across the district's vaccination programme in the top four cohorts - care home residents and their carers, health and care workers, over 70s and those regarded as clinically extremely vulnerable - was that there were plans in place to have these groups vaccinated by February 15.

In addition she said they were on course to deliver vaccination to all care home residents and staff by the end of this week - January 24.