CONCERNS have been raised to Cumbria’s health boss, about the ability to detect future Covid variants as the Government begins to scale back the testing programme.

Cumbria’s Director of Public Health, Colin Cox gave an update on the county’s position at this stage in the pandemic at a meeting on Friday.

Cumbria’s Health and Wellbeing Board, attended by NHS representatives and a number of executive level local leaders, heard that while Covid-19 situation is vastly improved 'it isn’t over.'

Mr Cox said: “We will be continuing to see the effects of Covid-19 for some time yet.”

Reflecting on the pandemic to-date, Mr Cox’s presentation illustrated the vast increases in cases with each wave, from the initial outbreak in Wuhan, to the latest spike in cases caused by the Omicron variant.

“The Alpha wave in January 2021 was in many ways the worst of them, certainly from a health perspective but you will see from this, the number of cases were actually considered greater in the Delta wave and the Omicron wave dwarfed everything over a short period of time.”

Cumbria has seen more than 132,000 cases recorded over the last two years.

However, Mr Cox said that the breakdown of cases shows “how critical vaccination has been to the pandemic, you can see that we hit the same number of cases in the Delta wave as we did with Alpha.

“In Omicron it was about four and a half times as many cases, the number of hospitalisations and deaths was vastly reduced compared to what we’ve seen in the Delta and Alpha waves.”

Mr Cox said that the scaling back of all Coronavirus restrictions, and the launch of a Living With Covid-19 Plan was 'a turning point' but warned that hospitals remain under pressure.

“From the end of this month, essentially all the public testing services are also going to end.

“There will still be testing availability for some higher risk groups and in some settings including social care but we await the detail of some of those.

“There is a potential for new variants to emerge, new variants undoubtedly will emerge out of Covid, the good question is whether they will hit us as a new wave and what the consequence of those will be.”

Mr Cox said that there is “every possibility” a future wave is more serious.

Virginia Taylor, the leader of Eden District Council, raised concerns about Cumbria’s ability to identify new variants as testing ramps down.

She said: “At the moment there’ll be less testing going on, it’s going to be a lot less consistent.

“Purely identifying them is going to be more difficult and dealing with them and particularly if it’s going to be one which is more dangerous. In the beginning thanks to everybody and especially you, we did it ourselves and got ahead of the situation.

“Can we try and do the same thing with variants of concern? If people have to pay for tests, that’s going to be a big disincentive to know what’s going on.”

Mr Cox said: “There is no doubt that as we reduce the amount of testing, the surveillance capacity we’ve got will diminish."