YORK Hospital has tightened rules on mask wearing - and shelved plans to reintroduce staff parking charges - following a surge in the number of Covid patients.

The York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said yesterday that it now had 137 patients with confirmed or suspected Covid-19 at its hospitals in York and Scarborough,with two of them in intensive care.

The number is up from 127 on Monday and just 77 on June 21 but it is still considerably fewer than the peak of 287 such patients at the end of March, during the height of the first Omicron wave.

The increase is in line with a nationwide trend involving a rapid growth in the number of people contracting the BA.4 and BA.5 variants of Omicron.

A trust spokeswoman stressed that the 'vast majority' of patients were not in hospital because they had Covid-19, but were coming in for something else and staff were discovering they had Covid-19 when testing them on admission.

However, she said masks had been made mandatory again in all clinical areas, not just high risk areas, and the trust was keeping this under review, and had surge plans so that it could open additional Covid-19 wards, should it need to.

The trust relaxed visiting restrictions less than a month ago on June 13, when they said that visitors might be asked to wear a mask only in inpatient settings where patients were at high risk of infection due to immunosuppression, e.g. oncology/haematology.

The spokeswoman revealed yesterday that the trust had also performed a U-turn on plans to make staff pay to park at the York Hospital car park.

A sign posted in the car park area last month stated: "In line with other trusts, we are reintroducing staff parking charges from July 1. If you require a permit to park on site, or need further information, please contact the ID teams."

The move prompted York Central MP Rachael Maskell to raise concerns, saying that while she wanted there to be a good public transport and safe walking and cycling routes to and from the hospital, she recognised that until these were in place, staff working unsocial hours needed to be able to get to work.

"However they shouldn’t be taxed for doing so with the reintroduction of parking charges," she said.

"When the NHS staff have not had a cost of living increase, parking is another draw on their budgets, just to get to work. Government should have recognised this, and the council should have put in place a modern transport system for York.

"Their failures are causing staff to drive and causing them to have to pay these charges.”

The trust spokeswoman confirmed yesterday that it had been planning to reintroduce charging but said that, 'due to the cost of living crisis and the fact that we are in another wave of Covid, we have decided not to for the time being.'