The town’s health chief has urged people to remain vigilant as the first steps in easing lockdown start today.

All school pupils in Swindon and across the country are due to return to school, and care home residents are allowed to have one regular indoor visitor.

The borough’s seven-day rolling infection rate in Swindon has dropped to 75.6 per 100,000.

But the director of public health Steve Maddern stressed the importance of following the Government’s guidelines to maintain this downward trend.

He said: “It is very encouraging. But we still need to be following the rules, although our case rate has gone up and come back down, we are still high as to regional and national averages.”

The local resilience forum, a collective of local agencies working together to deal with major incidents and emergencies, has written to several Swindon and Wiltshire businesses.

Mr Maddern said: “The forum thanked them for the work they’ve done to protect their staff but also reminded them that if they are using lateral flow testing, they need to ensure that their staff are still complying with the Covid guidelines.

“Police have broken up several parties where it has been workforce people together saying that because they used lateral flow testing they don’t need to socially distance. But that is not the case at all.

“That letter has gone out to a number of businesses, and it has been signed by council leaders of Swindon and Wiltshire and the Chief Constable of Wiltshire Police.”

Cases of the Brazil variant have been found in the UK, including in the south west, but Mr Maddern said the council would be ready to cope if cases were found in Swindon.

He told the Adver: “When we first entered the pandemic, every local authority had the responsibility to develop a local outbreak management plan. We’ve already started to review these documents and throughout March we will be filing and finalising those which would reflect how we respond to variants.

“At this moment in time, we know we don’t have that variant within our locality, but we are working very closely with our regional partners to keep on top of the data. If we are notified of such variants, then we would act accordingly. So yes, we are as ready as we can be.”

The number of tests completed in Swindon has reduced last week. There were 1,949 symptomatic tests done, including 121 tests at the Broadgreen site, 649 at the Wroughton Park and Ride, 401 at the civic annexe mobile testing unit and 778 postal test kits - down from 2,383 the previous week.

There was a total of 596 asymptomatic tests done last week with two positive cases.

Mr Maddern said on Friday that in the last two weeks, there was an increase in cases across SN2 and SN3. “We know through vaccination that the case rates in over 65s are incredibly low, which is fantastic

.”