OVID hospitalisations are continuing to rise in Devon’s hospitals, but a health boss predicts them to peak around the end of January.

There were 222 people with covid in hospital on Tuesday, January 18, according to Dr Paul Johnson, clinical chair of the NHS Devon Clinical Commissioning Group.

While the number has continued to go up, he told a monthly Team Devon meeting of local leaders: ‘The modelling suggests that we will peak probably in the next week or two and not go significantly higher than that – we may get nearer to 300 in some of our worst-case predictions.’

‘That’s a lot better than we predicted it would be,’ Dr Johnson added, for reasons including people being less likely to become severely ill from Omicron and thanks to the success of the vaccination programme.

The meeting was also told that only two patients in intensive care in Devon were being treated for covid.

‘As a proportion of our total inpatients, that is much lower than we’ve seen in the first two waves. Again, indicative of a milder disease and the level of protection that you get from the booster,’ Dr Johnson said.

The continued rise in hospitalisations comes despite cases beginning to fall across Devon, with figures from Tuesday [18 January] showing rates have dropped by around 40 per cent in the Devon County area and Plymouth, and by a quarter in Torbay.

But Devon’s director of public health Steve Brown urged caution on the figures, citing the change in national policy around testing as one of the possible reasons why official positive cases are lower.

Most people with a positive lateral flow test no longer need to take a PCR test to confirm they have covid, leading to a drop in the number of tests carried out in Devon. People can now also end their self-isolation after five full days, as long as they test negative on days five and six.

‘So, it’s really great to see the reported figures by and large coming down. My caution will be there’s obviously background community infections as well – much of which, as we know, goes undetected,’ said Mr Brown, who warned there could still be an uptick in cases from students returning to schools and colleges after Christmas.

Staff absences in hospitals due to covid are also down in Devon, the meeting heard, dropping from just over 1,100 to 880 in a week.

‘That’s a better position that we find ourselves in,” Dr Johnson said, but he warned there were ‘still a significant number of staff not available, and I know our social care colleagues are seeing similar sort of numbers and a similar sort of impact on their services.’