York has been named in a number of national newspapers as being in a list of 36 cities with ‘spiking coronavirus cases’ – which has naturally caused concern across the city.
Coming as it did on the same day that Leicester was put into a fresh lockdown due to a large rise in Covid-19 infections in the East Midlands city, York’s inclusion seemed particularly worrying.
In actual fact York has only had a single new coronavirus case confirmed by lab tests in the last week – and the last six days no new cases have been reported.
As you can see in our daily updates here, York hit a total of 462 confirmed Covid-19 cases as long ago as Thursday, 4 June.
Eighteen days later, one additional case was reported on Tuesday, 23 June – taking the total to 463.
And it has stayed at that total ever since.
However that one extra case was enough to put York on a list of 36 of the 151 upper-tier local authorities in England where confirmed cases were ‘rising’.
Along with York, Sunderland and the Isle of Wight were included on that list having detected just a single case in the week to June 26 – because they also had not picked up any cases in the week before.
Other centres are seeing much higher numbers of new cases, including Leicester – hence the local lockdown in that city.