The impact of reduced Covid restrictions is starting to be seen in rising case numbers says the town’s public health chief.

The case rate for Swindon as of yesterday was 21.6 per 100,000, up from 16.2 per 100,000 the previous week.

Swindon Borough Council’s director of public health Steve Maddern said: “Although we are seeing a slight increase in case numbers, we’re not seeing an impact on our health and social care services, which is really encouraging.

“We want to make sure that we keep our case numbers as low as possible. And although, we haven’t seen the initial early impacts of the lessening of restrictions, I think that’s starting to play out now.”

He said the small increase in numbers has been managed “as they always would be”.

“And unusual for Swindon is that we’re not at the top of the leaderboard at the moment for the highest case rate.

“So hopefully, we can try and keep it going down. What we’ve seen this week is a little bit of turbulence, but we’re definitely on a downward trend again, and hopefully we can keep it that way,” he said.

“We’ve seen a slight reduction in people testing across the last week, but the positive rate is increasing. So, for me, that’s telling that those people that are testing are the right people.”

The positive rate for Swindon was 0.9 per cent as of yesterday, 0.6 per cent for the south west and 1.8 per cent for England.

“In true Swindon fashion, we’re a little bit worse off than the south west average, but in a better position than the England average.

“Cases generally are low. There were only 48 cases across the whole of Swindon this past week.

“The majority of those reside in the 20 to 24 age bracket, which again would suggest that this is the group is most likely to be mixing more, but unlikely to be vaccinated in line with the programme at this moment in time.”

Everyone aged 25 and over is now being invited to get their coronavirus vaccine in England.

He said: “In the younger cases, it tends to be skewed towards female cases, and then in older cases, it tends to be skewed towards males. So it’s something to think about as we head into the Euro weekend.”

Variant concern accounts only for one fifth of the cases in Swindon according to Mr Maddern.

He said: “The Delta variant and other variants are not the dominant case sin Swindon at this time, although it is anticipated nationally that it will become the dominant variant.”