What's going round

What's going round near you?

The UK Health Security Agency publishes what its laboratories, A&E departments and GP surgeries are seeing, region by region, every week. This page reads that dashboard for your postcode's region and council area: which winter viruses are on the rise, whether A&E is busier with chest infections than the season would suggest, how measles and invasive group A strep are running, and how many children locally are vaccinated. For a Scottish postcode it reads Public Health Scotland instead: confirmed cases per 100,000 by health board and council, test positivity and hospital admissions.

  • Flu, RSV, COVID-19 and colds
  • A&E against the seasonal baseline
  • Measles and vaccine coverage

How this works

The page asks the UKHSA data dashboard’s public API for a dozen series at once. For the postcode’s UKHSA region: the weekly share of laboratory tests positive for influenza, RSV, human metapneumovirus and rhinovirus, the daily rolling PCR positivity for COVID-19, emergency department attendances for acute respiratory infection and for scarlet fever against the level expected for the time of year, laboratory-confirmed measles cases by week of onset, and invasive group A strep cases per 100,000 by month. For the council area: the COVID-19 case rate and test positivity (a two-tier county is used when the district is not reported). For the upper-tier council: MMR, 6-in-1 and MenB coverage from the annual childhood immunisation statistics. The heat-health and cold-health alert in force for the region is read from the dashboard’s alert pages, which have no API of their own. Each card shows the latest figure, the last twelve weeks or sixty days as a line, and the change on four weeks earlier. Answers are cached for an hour.

For a Scottish postcode the page reads Public Health Scotland’s weekly respiratory data instead: laboratory-confirmed flu, RSV and COVID-19 cases per 100,000 for the postcode’s health board, COVID-19 test positivity and hospital admissions for the board, the rarer viruses for Scotland as a whole, and COVID-19 cases for the council area. Scotland has no equivalent of the syndromic, measles, vaccine coverage or weather-health alert series here, so those cards do not appear. Wales and Northern Ireland publish through their own agencies, linked from the page for postcodes there.

Sources

  • UKHSA data dashboard API (api.ukhsa-dashboard.data.gov.uk). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0; © Crown copyright.
  • Public Health Scotland open data (opendata.nhs.scot, viral respiratory diseases dataset). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
  • Postcodes: postcodes.io / ONS Postcode Directory (OGL v3).

For information only. Surveillance figures describe a region, not a person; if you are unwell, use NHS 111 or your GP.