8,000 people in Dorset likely to have been infected by coronavirus

He told councillors this week that it remained important to continue to focus on social distancing while professional teams concentrated their efforts on the infection rate in local care homes.

Mr Crowe said it was largely due to Dorset people sticking to the guidelines that the outbreak had not been as severe in the county as it had been elsewhere.

Speaking to an online Dorset Cabinet meeting he said the outbreak had been unlike anything he had experienced in his 20-year career.

“When I began to realise the likely impact of this change, perhaps in February, it was very clear that it would be very different to how we have worked in previous pandemics. I have been involved in two in my 20-year career, but none have been anything like this in terms of the scale and impact and the lack of interventions we have to deploy and protect people and keep them safe.”

Mr Crowe said the response from councils locally and the health and care system had been ‘outstanding’.

“Because of the social distancing deployed and because people have largely stayed at home to protect services and save lives, the impact to date has not been as severe as in other parts of the UK.

We have had 328 confirmed cases (Tuesday’s figure) in the Dorset Council area, but this is just a fraction of the true number of cases, because of a lack of access to testing, particularly in the first few weeks of the pandemic. There are likely to be many more untested infections among people in the community, perhaps as many as up to 8,000.”

He said that in the coming weeks it would be important to maintain people’s focus on social distancing and that, at the moment, the real pressure was in care homes.

“Across Dorset as many as one in four care homes have an outbreak due to Covid, or have had an outbreak investigated over the past few weeks, and that is really where we are beginning to focus our efforts working with Dorset Clinical Commissioning Group, colleagues in adult social care and the primary care team locally to provide more support to those care homes and to stop the transmission.

“The other focus for the public health team over the next few weeks is, as we start to come out of the acute phase, and the Government starts to look at, potentially, easing the policy on lockdown, how do we support the national efforts on contact tracing…. I am hoping we will be able to lend a huge amount of support to that because that’s the way out the current social distancing measures and the way we can start to look at safely easing the current measures and getting back to a new normal.”