Public Health chief prompts Northampton school children and parents to meet in parks and not friend's houses during half term

Six out of 326 Northamptonshire schools shut their doors before the planned half term because of coronavirus, Northamptonshire County Council has said at today's weekly media briefing.

It comes as the age group with the most positive test results in Northamptonshire over the past 28 days is between 10 and 19 year olds, which includes 281 females and 247 males.

This week Northampton International Academy, St James Primary School, Henry Chichele Primary in Higham Ferres and Weston Favell Academy all shut early because of a rise in Covid cases. Northamptonshire County Council has not told the Chronicle & Echo which other two schools shut.

Director of Public Health Northamptonshire, Lucy Wightman, today told the media: "Obviously we've had a difficult couple of weeks and although there has been some good news in that the increase was less steep between last week and this weeks cases, we have seen another week of case increases, sadly.

"We continue to see that the majority of the positive cases are caused by community transmission, so either between households - so either one person in a household infecting the rest of their family or the rest of their household or indeed from household to household where people are obviously continuing to engage outside of their household group.

"This continues to be a real challenge and I understand people's desire to socialise but again we are reiterating the message that just because you are able to do this doesn't mean that you should."

Since October 19, there has been nine active outbreaks at schools and colleges and The University of Northampton has today (Friday) confirmed they now have 27 cases - mostly linked through social activity.

Lucy Wightman added: "We've obviously got half term next week and it's an opportunity for us to try and break that onward cycle of transmission.

"We know at the moment that a lot of the school outbreaks when we speak to the cases and parents that sleepovers and socialising outside of the school environment is actually a factor.

"We have concerns that the onwards transmission is now starting to affect our more older and more vulnerable residents and that again is translating into admissions into hospital.

"So this half term we are encouraging people that if they do want to meet with their friends that they meet in a park, instead of in private gardens, and always socialise outside.

"We are obviously recommending that people don't have sleepovers as that's being cited as one of the issues around school outbreaks.

"Clearly that's not because I want to spoil people's fun, that's because when we've looked at the data, it is a factor and therefore, for a short period of time, if we are able to avoid that then we would encourage people to do so."

Paul Andrews from Northamptonshire County Council said: "I just want to make a distinction that the schools are effectively closed because the headteacher, govenors or the trustees have decided that they don't have the staff to remain open safely.

"That's not the same thing as high number of positive cases, necessarily. The other thing I think I'd caution about using the number of schools as a meaure is that schools are so diverse from small village primarys with 60 children to bigger secondary academies with a couple of thousand.

"That measure is not one we'd like to use, we'd much rather use a percentage of attendance and I think you can see that although it's dropped the percentage attendance is still reasonably good and it's certainly better than the national averages."