Top five covid UK hotspots revealed as cases spike by nearly 37,000

• Tewkesbury (up from 484.4 to 1,212.9)
• Cheltenham (602.4 to 1273.7)
• Stroud (607.9 to 1,202.6)
• Blaenau Gwent (649.8 to 1,213.9)
• Swindon (580.6 to 1,112.3)

These are the increases in covid cases over the last week, with Cheltenham, Gloucestershire racking up the most at approximately 1,273.7 cases per 100,000 people. Moreover, numbers are rising across the board, with the latest statistics showing more than 20 per cent more hospitalisations since October 19, an 8.4 per cent increase in deaths from Monday and a slimmer - though still concerning - 2.2 per cent increase in daily cases nationwide. Last week, the head of the NHS Confederation, Matthew Taylor, warned that proper preparations for 'plan B' need to be rolled out sooner than later. The suggestion was that the UK is already right "on the edge" and that delaying could put "unsustainable pressure" on an already strained public health system. Furthermore, aside from these specific hotspots, Professor Peter Openshaw - a member of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) - has warned that the current infection rate in the UK is “unacceptable” and “astonishingly high” compared to “most other west European countries”. On October 20, more people died than on the same day last year when the country was heading into the tier system - and just a couple of days later, it was announced that more people died of covid in the last month than of flu in 2018/19 combined.