Sussex in southern England is now a Covid hotspot, having been largely unaffected by the original outbreak in March.
Will Flockton from BBC Sussex told Summer Times the picture is grim on the south coast of England.
“This is basically the epicentre of the latest UK coronavirus outbreak,” he says.
Photo: AFP
“Basically, cases have been sky rocketing here.
“There’s once place here in Sussex, Hastings, that had the lowest number of cases in the whole of the UK in mid-November.
"By mid-December it was one of the highest in the UK so it just shows hoe cases have been rapidly rising.”
The seaside town of Brighton, where Flockton is based, peaked at around 1000 cases per 100,000.
“So, 2000 people out and about in a city of 300,000 with Covid.
“It’s very prevalent where I am and the impact has been felt quite dramatically. Our hospital announced last week, The Royal Sussex, that all 66 critical care beds in the ICU were full with Covid patients and that they’ve had to expand the intensive care unit to cope with all these patients.”
People are dying in large numbers, he says.
“Last week we had nearly 400 people die in a city of 300,000.”
Flockton himself has caught Covid, but is one of the lucky ones, he says, being asymptomatic.
More broadly in the UK the picture is equally grim, he says.
“In mid-November we were in a second lockdown so, we are now currently in our third lock down. We had one lockdown lasting a nearly 2 to 3 months way back in March
“In November we had a defined month’s lockdown, where all the shops shut but schools stayed open.
“In mid-November this new highly infectious strain started developing in Kent and from then cases just sky rocketed.”
At the same time Boris Johnson’s Government’s determination to ‘save Christmas’ made things even worse, he says.
“Barely a week after Christmas Day we’re in full lockdown again.
“Cases have peaked in the last couple of days. But at the same time hospital admissions are going up and up and the death toll is going up.
“In the last 24 hours, 1800 people have been reported dead from Covid, this is the worst day for deaths, and scientists are saying there is a two-week lag between when cases start dropping and death figures start dropping, so we’ve still got two weeks of increases ahead of us.
“Here in Sussex we weren’t badly affected in March, but this time it’s just very grim.”
