Image: Royal Voluntary Service. Image detail: Iona Lidington via Kingston Council.
The number of new cases of Covid-19 is rising in Kingston again after weeks of decline in the borough and across South London.
On Tuesday (March 16) the Surrey Comet caught up with Director of Public Health on Kingston Council, Iona Lidington, to see what was behind the latest data on cases and how authorities in the borough are responding.
Why are the numbers of new cases in Kingston rising?
There are a couple of reasons why we've seen the rate, which is quite variable at the moment, bump up a little bit. Generally we're quite pleased at how rates have gone down but clearly we want them to keep going down. It's a concern to see infections go up in any of the age groups. We've particularly seen it in our teenagers and over 70s. Our teenagers we can perhaps understand because we've been doing much more testing. All secondary school pupils have been tested three times in school before testing at home twice a week. So we've done over 35,000 tests with our secondary school pupils in the last 10 days. We've found at least a small number of positives there and it's really important we find those because obviously they go home and self isolate and their families and close contacts do too. That obviously stops the onward transition. Those asymptomatic tests are really important and it's really important we keep doing them, so it's not surprising that it's gone up a little bit in that age group.