Support for care homes and schools in preventing and managing outbreaks of Covid-19 will continue even as restrictions are lifted, senior councillors and health professionals were told.

Swindon borough council's director of public health, Steve Maddern presented the borough's update local outbreak management plan to members of the council-led Health and Wellbeing Board yesterday.

Mr Maddern said: "This builds upon the knowledge we have learnt across the past year since our first edition was published in May 2020. This document hopefully can provide reassurance that we are doing all we can, with the knowledge and tools we have to tackle Covid and the impacts it has upon our communities."

Since the last document, Mr Maddern said, sections on testing, venue alerts, and responses to variants of concern and living with Covid-19 were added.

The plan says testing is vital to managing outbreaks and preventing them getting out of hand: " Previous issues with testing capacity has been linked to lab capacity, not capacity to deliver test at site.

We have strategically placed testing sites in the areas of most need or higher prevalence – based on case rates but also harder to reach groups.

"Two of our three symptomatic test sites and two of our asymptomatic test sites sit within our SN1 and SN2 post code areas where we have seen stubborn transmission.

"Our community testing offer is extended beyond regular business and also include more vulnerable groups including those work with or those that are homeless and sex workers.

Any local testing strategy will be driven by local intelligence, working with our community."

The plan says the 15.5 per cent of Swindonians who are Black, Asian or of another ethnic minority must be taken into account when communicating with the public at large.

It says a special care home cell was set up early in the pandemic last year to support the 100 or so care homes in Swindon - giving prevention advice, priority access to testing and training of staff. It adds: "This support cell will continue for the foreseeable future to ensure that care homes are supported with prevention guidance, information and advice but also supported during outbreak scenarios."

Schools are also to be supported with a cell made up of public health and education experts in response to outbreaks there.