South Kesteven has recorded more cases of Coronavirus today, but it remains in third place as county's hotspot.

Official government figures this afternoon reveal 348 new coronavirus cases and 17 COVID-related deaths in Greater Lincolnshire.

The government's COVID-19 dashboard today recorded 277 new cases in Lincolnshire, 40 in North Lincolnshire and 31 in North East Lincolnshire.

Among the districts, South Kesteven recorded 65 cases today compared with 42 yesterday and 78 on Monday.

This gives a grand total of 5381 cases since the start of the pandemic, equivalent to about one-in-25 of the district's population.

The number of cases over the past week has increased to 415 today, compared with 395 yesterday and 410 on Monday. This gives a current 7-day rate of 291.4 cases per 100,000 of population.

Last Monday, South Kesteven had a 7-day rate of 391.8 cases per 100,000, so the number of fresh cases have dropped by a quarter since then.

The number of deaths today remained at 163, or 114.4 per 100,000, which means just over one-in-a-thousand have died of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.

On Wednesday, 14 deaths were registered in Lincolnshire, two in North East Lincolnshire and one in North Lincolnshire. These figures include deaths both in and out of hospitals, as well as residents in hospitals outside the county.

Just over half of all Greater Lincolnshire districts have slightly increased in their infection rates, with South Holland taking the top spot.

However, Greater Lincolnshire has seen an overall decrease on Wednesday, mirroring the decrease nationally.

NHS England reported eight new local hospital deaths on Wednesday, including six at United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust and two at Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust (NLAG).

On Wednesday, national cases increased by 38,905 to 3,505,754, while deaths rose by 1,820 to 93,290 – the highest number of deaths recorded since the pandemic started.

In local news, six in ten new COVID cases in Lincolnshire were with the new, more infectious variant in the first week of 2021.

The county council's public health team said that by January 8, 59.2% of tests contained a variant of the virus — up from 36% in the last two weeks of 2020.

Lincolnshire's frontline police officers are being offered doses of the COVID-19 vaccine that are left over at the end of a day. Lincolnshire Police's force control room will be called each day with the offer of spare vaccines that weren't used throughout the day due to the jab not being able to be stored overnight. A care home in the Skegness area was found to have inadequate safety procedures and poor use of PPE in a recent Care Quality Commission inspection. Nationally, the UK will need to look "very carefully" at new data from Israel which suggests protection provided by the first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is lower than had been found in trials, the government's chief scientific adviser told Sky News. Sir Patrick Vallance said the government would "just need to keep measuring the numbers" as the vaccine is rolled out across the UK. Two hospital trusts are among the first in the country to begin offering a 24/7 COVID vaccination programme. The University Hospitals Birmingham and Nottinghamshire's Sherwood Forest Hospitals trusts have been chosen to pilot the round-the-clock jabs from Wednesday. Coronavirus data for Greater Lincolnshire on Wednesday, January 20

44,988 cases (up 348)

31,269 in Lincolnshire (up 277)

6,997 in North Lincolnshire (up 40)

6,722 in North East Lincolnshire (up 31)

1,726 deaths (up 17)

1,226 from Lincolnshire (up 14)

271 from North Lincolnshire (up one)

229 from North East Lincolnshire (up two)

of which 1,024 hospital deaths (up eight)

623 at United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust (up six)

30 at Lincolnshire Community Health Service hospitals (no change)

1 at Lincolnshire Partnership Foundation Trust (no change)

370 in Northern Lincolnshire (NLAG) (up two) 3,505,754 UK cases, 93,290 deaths DATA SOURCE — FIGURES CORRECT AT THE TIME OF the latest update. postcode data includes deaths not in healthcare facilities or in hospitals outside authority boundaries.