THE number of Covid patients at York and Scarborough hospitals has risen slightly - and one patient has had to go into intensive care.

York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said today that it was now treating eight confirmed and suspected Covid inpatients, one of them in ICU.

The trust had seven such patients yesterday, none of them needing intensive care.

The slight increase in patient numbers follow the recent surge in the number of Covid cases in the region, fuelled by the more transmissible Delta variant.

However, numbers still remain only a fraction of the peak of 242 patients at the trust during the second wave of infections in January. This is because most older, vulnerable people who tended then to be the ones who needed hospitalisation if they caught the virus have now been fully vaccinated, giving them strong protection against it.