South Tyneside: Vaccine support continues in former Covid hotspot

South Tyneside has been targeted to encourage vaccinations

A surge in South Tyneside's Covid rate was down to the Delta variant combined with younger people not being fully-vaccinated, a health chief said.

The borough was worst-hit for a period in July but was recently placed 226 in England, according to government data.

Teams have been targeting areas with low vaccination take-up and director of public health Tom Hall urged people to use walk-in centres.

Despite the drop, he urged people to remain cautious.

"We got the Delta variant to the North East a bit later than the rest of the country and as we knew at the time our population wasn't yet fully-vaccinated, particularly in the younger age groups - and then what we saw was a lot of cases associated with that," he said.

"As I reported at the time, a lot of them (were) in the 17 to 25-year-old age category, which of course was the last group of people that were invited to come forward for the vaccination programme."

'Covid still here'

South Tyneside covers South Shields, Jarrow, Hebburn, Boldon, Whitburn and Cleadon.

Government staff have been knocking on doors in the area to try to persuade people to have a Covid vaccination.

Mr Hall said cases began to drop towards the end of the school summer term due to people self-isolating.

He urged people to continue to be "extra cautious" by wearing face coverings in public spaces and reducing social contacts.

"We know particularly our 18 to 29-year-olds have got a lower uptake at the vaccine at the moment - it's still very good, it's over 60 per cent for a first dose and we are increasing those second doses accordingly," he said.

"As we have seen, if we do have a new variant, it can spread very quickly and we have seen unfortunately NHS pressures, more people in hospital beds, as a result of the surge that we saw in July - thankfully that's going down now - but it is still there."