Cornwall's health chief says they are constantly reviewing the data to see whether a separate vaccination centre will be set up in Falmouth due to the recent spike in infections.

Speaking at a media briefing this afternoon Cornwall's director of Public Health Rachel Wrigglesworth told the Packet that while they were not looking at setting up a vaccination centre in Falmouth at the moment the situation was constantly under review.

"The vaccination to over 18s opened just last week had good progress in uptake with over 40% in that group taking up the vaccine," she said. "So clearly we have made good progress already. The Stithians site is not too far from the Penryn campus it is a journey that is not too distant from that particular area.

"The NHS do lead the vaccination programme and we are working with them to ensure the availability and access across all of those target age ranges is in place in the coming weeks.

"There is also of course the importance of promotion of the second vaccine in the 40 to 49 groups and also that has reduced in the time scale where people used to have a 12 week gap that's now been reduced to eight weeks. So we are really encouraging as well, second dose uptake amongst that actually slightly more higher risk group.

"It's got to be a proportional response that I think the NHS are leading very well. We will be reviewing where we have any low rates of uptake and try and make sure that we engage with those populations. We do have the opportunity to do some pop ups and some outreach and of course we have pharmacies as well offering different routes for vaccination.

"We feel the programme is going well but we will be reviewing that in the coming weeks so we can target it better."

She maintained that the recent spike in Covid cases in Falmouth, St Ives and Newquay was not due to the recent G7 summit. She said the spikes were due to a number of factors including a large number of visitors descending on the area during half-term.

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However she was unable to explain why other popular holiday centres such as Padstow, Penzance and Perranporth, which were not involved in the G7 had not seen a spike in cases.

"When you get a cluster that sometime links a number of hospitality venues together, that's when we see further community transmission," she said. "Clearly there may be small number of cases in those areas created by more sociable networks within a particular area to spread slightly further.

"So whether that was about tourist numbers or not, it is also clear that within Cornwall the relaxation, some mixing indoors, all of the things that we know during our tier time in tier 1 back in December, did lead in Cornwall to a similar situation of very rising levels.

"We do know the Delta variant increases that rate of transmission. We are not just saying it is just tourists it is a number of factors that I think have bought our rates up within the area but clearly it can happen quickly."