Hospitals in Covid hotspots such as Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley and Bolton are seeing a “significantly” lower death rate among people admitted for treatment and are coping with current levels of infection, the head of NHS Providers has said.

Chief executive of the body which represents NHS trusts, Chris Hopson, said there was a degree of confidence that vaccines have “broken” the link between infections and the “very high level of hospitalisations and mortality we’ve seen in previous waves”.

He told Times Radio: “And if - and it is a big if - if Bolton has gone through its complete cycle and if other areas follow Bolton, the view from the hospital there was that they were able to cope with the level of infections.

“It’s important not to just focus on the raw numbers here…you also do need to look at who’s being admitted into hospital and how clinically vulnerable and what level of acuity they’ve got.

“What chief executives are consistently telling us is that it is a much younger population that is coming in, they are less clinically vulnerable, they are less in need of critical care and therefore they’re seeing what they believe is a significantly lower mortality rate which is, you know, borne out by the figures.

“So it’s not just the numbers of people who are coming in, it’s actually the level of harm and clinical risk.”

An increased package of support is being provided to Greater Manchester and Lancashire, similar to that seen in Bolton, where case numbers of the Delta variant first identified in India have been relatively high.

It is thought that Blackburn with Darwen is around two weeks behind Bolton in terms of hospital admissions, and the borough's director of public health, Professor Dominic Harrison has said that even thought the hospital numbers have been rising over the last three weeks, in line with the confirmed cases rise, the increase not been exponential.

He said that 'turnover and flow of patients in hospital is faster than previous waves with the vast majority, even from critical care, eventually discharged and the number of deaths minimal', attrributing this to the average age of hospitalised patients being much younger than previous waves, and about half have some vaccination protection.

The data suggests that if cases continue to rise across Pennine Lancashire as a whole, the hospital could eventually be swamped with Covid cases and activity, but, and this must be stressed, not unmanageably so.

Althought this would potentially delay the wider recovery of ‘business as usual’, Professor Harrison said it would not bring with it very high rates of deaths seen in previous waves.

Meanwhile, Mr Hopson said any decision on easing remaining lockdown restrictions in England on June 21 was finely balanced, adding that if “incredibly busy” hospitals see even a small rise in Covid patients, they could have to “make some trade-offs between Covid and non-Covid care”.

He added that “we don’t quite know where we are in terms of, are we at the beginning of an exponential rise or not?”.

But he said the “picture on mortality seems really pretty clear, that we’ve had less than 15 people a day dying from Covid for nearly about seven weeks now and that compares to well over 1,000 a day in the January peak and 800 a day in April last year”.

It comes as new Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows an estimated eight in 10 (80 per cent) adults in households in England were likely to have tested positive for Covid-19 antibodies in the week beginning May 17 – a marker of whether somebody had the infection in the past or has been vaccinated.