THERE has been a rise in the number of patients receiving care at Warrington after testing positive for coronavirus.

This is according to the latest Covid-19 update released by Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust this afternoon, Tuesday.

At present, 40 beds at the Lovely Lane site are occupied by patients that have tested positive for Covid in the past 14 days or less.

Of this number, four are receiving care in the hospital’s intensive care unit.

This is a rise of six patients in total since yesterday, with the number in ICU rising by one.

However, five more patients were discharged from the hospital in the past 24 hours after recovering from the virus.

This takes the trust’s virus discharge total since the start of the pandemic to 2,391.

No new deaths have been recorded since yesterday, with the hospital’s Covid death toll remaining at 539.

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Across Warrington as a whole, 1,353 new cases were recorded in the seven days leading up to October 14, which is the most recent period for which data is available.

This demonstrates an infection rate of 646.1 cases among every 100,000 residents, which puts Warrington 38th highest in terms of case rates among all local authority areas in the UK.

This is an increase from 1,018 infections, or 486.2 cases per every 100,000 people, in the previous week leading up to October 7.

Warrington is among 327 of 377 local areas in the UK that have seen a week-on-week rise in rates (87 per cent), while 50 have seen a fall (13 per cent).