Update from Tony Hill,
Interim Director of Public Health
14 January 2021
Dear headteachers,
Further to a request from schools for more data on COVID rates, West Sussex County Council public health will from today be sending a weekly update of some of the key headlines.
From the vast amount of data available, we will focus on the trends we are seeing in under 20 year olds, showing variation by age group and district and borough.
Please see below and attached for ease this week’s update and along with the key messages and some explanation of how to interpret the data.
|
 This week’s figures show that:
- Rates are highest in 15-19 year olds and have been since the middle of December
-
Rates in all age groups had been increasing rapidly since the middle of December, particularly in 15 to 19 year olds. This seems likely to be connected to the new variant
- In the last week, in all age groups, the rates have begun to decrease
- It is too early to say if this is a consistent trend, the data in the next few days will help inform this
- However, there are reasons to be hesitantly optimistic that rates may have begun to decline in response to the lockdown and its measures
Notes on the figures: they show the rolling 7-day rate (per 100,000) of cases of COVID-19 among children and young people, by 5-year age bands. We have chosen to cover the period from the 1 September 2020 when many settings reopened, until the most recent 7-day period we have data for.
This week, the table shows that:
- In West Sussex, as in the South East and England as a whole, the under 20 rates of Covid are highest in the 15-19 age groups. In West Sussex they are around twice as high as the next age group
- Rates in 15-19s are particularly high in Crawley, Adur and Arun, at over 900 per 100,000, with Crawley close to 1,000 per 100,000. However these do represent relatively small numbers (there are only four more cases in 15-19s in Crawley than in Mid Sussex.)
- There is some variation across the county, with Chichester currently having lower rates in most of the age sub groups.
Notes on the table: the data shows the number and rate of cases of COVID-19 among children and young people under 20 in the most recent 7-day period (taking account of a built in time lag.) Using rates as well as absolute numbers enables comparison across areas with different population sizes. For example: the table shows that there were 107 new cases of COVID in 0-4s in West Sussex in the most recent week, a rate of 232 per 100,000. This was similar to the rates in the South East as a whole, but higher than the England rates. Rates allow more accurate comparison between areas as they take into account that population sizes vary. However, it is also important to bear in mind that the further populations are broken down into small sub groups (such as five year age bands), the smaller the numbers involved. Sometimes very small differences in numbers can create larger differences in rates.
I hope you find this information useful going forward.
Best regards
Tony Hill
| 
