West Sussex COVID-19 Data Dashboard

From the 1st April 2022, the eligibility for getting a free test for COVID-19 in England has changed with many walk in services or pick up points for rapid lateral flow home test kits ending. In addition, most people in England are no longer advised to get tested for COVID-19 (See the NHS England pages for more details on testing).

A small number of people are still able to get free NHS Covid-19 testing. Tests are available for those who are going into hospital for a procedure or surgery or for those with certain health conditions. Patient-facing staff who work in the NHS or in social care are also eligible for free testing. Some local authorities also provide limited supplies of test kits to residents.

Commercial test kits are also available for purchase and there may be requirements for some people to take a COVID-19 test. For example, whilst individuals no longer need to take a COVID-19 test to travel to the UK, some international destinations may require proof of a negative test result. Most commercially available lateral flow test kit results cannot be reported to the UK Government's national reporting system.

As such, the number of people eligible for getting a test and the number of people able to report their test results are now much lower and this will impact case numbers in addition to falling numbers of infections.

The following information is produced by the West Sussex Public Health and Social Research Unit and is the mobile/tablet friendly data summary of what we know about COVID-19 in West Sussex. For more in-depth analyses, visit our desktop-only version.

We are working as fast as possible to bring you elements from the desktop site to this mobile friendly page. If you have any comments or questions, please email us at publichealth@westsussex.gov.uk. This will be updated each day, Monday to Friday and we will try to update the site as quickly as new information is available on cases, numbers of people being treated in hospital, deaths, as well as vaccinations.

Use the menu at the top of the page to jump to a section and find out more.

Health care in the South East

Vaccinations

Deaths

The number of cases, unless specified, corresponds to the number of new confirmed COVID-19 positive cases (identified via a positive test result). Individuals are only counted once, for their first positive result, even if they are tested several times.

Given the differences in population sizes across areas, you might expect there to be more cases in certain areas. Viewing the cases per 100,000 population allows you to compare across areas as if they had the same population size. We have used the 2020 mid year population estimates from the Office for National Statistics to calculate these rates.

Latest rates at a glance

Note, it takes several days for all results to be confirmed after swabs are taken. As such, seven day rates includes the latest seven day period for which data is considered complete. For more information on the data published by the UK governement see the about the data section on seven day metrics.

Area Rate per 100,000 population Are cases going up or down compared to the previous week?*

Each bar represents the number of cases swabbed on that date (the specimen date), and the black line shows the rolling seven day average number of new cases. The last four days may be an underestimate of the true number of cases due to delays in reporting results (these are coloured orange). The orange bars are not included in any metrics such as the latest weekly incidence rates.

Cases among those aged 60+

Data for the last few days (which are incomplete) are not available for cases among this age group.

The table below shows the latest available rates of new cases among those aged 60 and over in West Sussex, South East region and nationally. Again, this table shows the latest 7 day period for which data is considered complete (the date of publication minus 5 days).

Area Rate per 100,000 population aged 60+ Are cases going up or down compared to last week?*

Vaccinations

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advise the government on the groups that should be prioritised for vaccination. For more information on the UK vaccination programme see the UK Government website.

Some areas have more older people, or those who are otherwise clinically vulnerable, or may have more health and social care workers and so these areas will likely show as having a higher proportion of people with vaccinations as these populations were prioritised to receive immunisation.

There are several factors involved in the uptake of COVID-19 vaccinations locally. To find out more information, please go to the main West Sussex COVID-19 site. Note that the main site does not work well on mobile devices.

This number of individuals receiving vaccinations excludes a small number of people who did not have their age recorded at the time of vaccination. As such it may be different to figures presented elsewhere.

This excludes a small number of individuals where age was unknown at the time of vaccination. Currently, those aged under 18 are not eligible for the vaccine and so this cohort has been removed from the denominator (the population at large) in calculating the proportion value for those receiving a COVID-19 vaccination overall.

Cases in your local area

The number of new confirmed cases is now available at a very localised area (called Middle-layer Super Output Areas or MSOAs for short) covering communities of on average 7,000 people. This is useful as it means you can see what cases are like where you live or where your friends and family live. We do not get the same detail from the data published at this level compared to wider areas and when there are fewer than three cases in a seven day period in the MSOA, these are supressed.

You can search for any postcode in England in the box below and more detail about cases in that local area will appear.

As some data are suppressed, where there have been very few cases in a 7 day period, it is not possible to calculate how many cases there have been in total in a local area. See Department of Health & Social care guidance on supressing small counts.

It should be noted that at a small area level (particularly at a local neighbourhood level such as MSOA) figures can fluctuate considerably from day to day and a small change in the number of cases (for example if a few large family groups test positive) this can have a big impact on the rates, so it is always worth considering not only your immediate area but the wider area when looking at the current situation and trends.

The Office for National Statistics publish weekly data on the number of deaths occurring each week in 2020 and whether or not COVID-19 was mentioned as an underlying or contributing factor to the death. There is a lag of 11 days because the data are based on death registrations.

The figure below shows the total number of deaths in each area by week of occurrence. The lighter blue bars denote the number of deaths occurring in that week which did not mention COVID-19 and the dark blue bars on top are for deaths where COVID-19 was mentioned as an underlying or contributing factor.

For most areas, COVID-19 deaths start to jump up at the end of March 2020, and numbers fall around the beginning of June and then a second wave of deaths begin at the end of the year.

ONS also record the place of death for mortality statistics and the figure below shows the number of deaths in Care Home settings by week. Note, the scale of the figure is the same as the figure above.

Attributions

The data used in this analyses primarily come from UK Government for new case data, NHS Digital for NHS pathway contacts, and Office for National Statistics for data on mortality.

Data used in this analyses are supplied under Open Government Licence and a number of supporting products such as geographical boundaries and postcode lookups have also been used.

The following copyright notices are applicable:

Infographic images designed by Freepik from Flaticon