WALES could be past the peak of the third Covid wave, a health commentator has said.

Jamie Jenkins, former head of health statistics at the Office for National Statistics, said both England and Wales could now be "over the hill" of the third wave.

Speaking to LBC, Mr Jenkins said: "(Cases) in England and Wales have been coming down since July 19, the cases have been falling for a couple of weeks there, then you get that time-lag effect when cases start coming down you get, around five or six days later, you start seeing hospital admissions come down, and then you start seeing deaths come down.

“I think looking at the data, we normally see deaths peaking around 14 days after cases come down, I think we might start being over the hill now when it comes to deaths.”

He added: “We probably are over the edge of the wave at the moment but let’s have a bit of caution as we go into the autumn period.”

READ MORE:

The commentator said that hospital admissions were around 80 per cent lower than what they would have been in the past and deaths were 90 per cent lower, adding: “The vaccine effect has kicked in as well – if you look at the same number of cases to what we had in the winter, it would have been 800 deaths rather than 65-70.”

This is a table of the rolling seven-day case rates across Gwent and the national figure for Wales throughout July.

South Wales Argus:

The data shows case rates falling across all areas from the middle of the month to the end of the month.

However, the latest seven day case rate available from Public Health Wales, which covers the period from July 22 to July 28, shows a rise in case rates across parts of Gwent.

  • We want to hear why you love Newport. Click here to tell us a bit about yourself and what you like the most about our city, and we’ll share it with our readers.

While rates continue to drop in Caerphilly and Torfaen, they have increased in Monmouthshire, Blaenau Gwent and Newport.

They are small rises in Monmouthshire, 114.2 per 100 residents to 116.3, and Blaenau Gwent, 91.6 per 100,000 residents to 100.2.

However, in Newport the rate has jumped to more than 150 cases per 100,000 residents again, at 159.7.

The national rate across Wales continues to fall in the latest figures, to 144 per 100,000 residents.