The seriously ill are being moved amid another surge in Covid patients at Blackpool Victoria Hospital

Dr Jim Gardner, medical director at Blackpool Victoria Hospital and the Clifton Hospital in St Annes, said 169 people within 14 days of a positive test are now in hospital, up from 152 last week and 135 two weeks ago.

"The basic picture is we have got more Covid-positive patients this week than we had last week," he said during his weekly briefing this afternoon.

"The numbers are steadily rising."

Some 130 patients are on general wards at the Vic, 20 are at the Clifton, while 19 are in intensive care beds at the Vic.

The intensive care unit has doubled in size and now has 32 beds when they are usually 16, Dr Gardner said.

He said some seriously ill patients have been moved to hospitals in Preston or Blackburn, and vice versa, while some routine operations have also been axed as medics battle the coronavirus.

"Those transfers are used in order to make sure we have got capacity at every site across the county," Dr Gardner said.

In the past seven days, a further 22 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid, taking the Vic's official death toll to 627.

"We seem to be running at around 20 to 25 [deaths] per week," Dr Gardner said. "My condolences go out to all the families involved.

"I know what a difficult situation this is for everyone because of visiting [being restricted] and other arrangements and so on."

Dr Gardner said community infection rates are "broadly flat" compared to last week but are "high", with 308 infections per 100,000 people in Blackpool, down from 343 last week.

Fylde's rate is 322, down from 323, and Wyre's is 381, down from 444.

"There's some good news and there's bad news in that, isn't there," he said.

"We are seeing a kind of levelling off, but the level is high. Over the summer, we were thinking of high being a number around about 100 per 100,000 and now we are talking about 300 per 100,000.

"There's such a long way to go still to get those numbers back down into something that is going to be acceptable to all of us and allow us to come out of lockdown and see a decrease in the number of really poorly patients we are seeing coming into hospital."

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