One south Essex borough has around 300 Covid cases - a study has revealed.

New data from the Covid Symptom Study, an app which tracks people with coronavirus symptoms in the UK, suggests 33,433 Brits are currently infected by the virus.

It also estimates Castle Point has 383 symptomatic virus cases, 69 in Southend and 33 symptomatic virus cases in Basildon.

While the study estimates there are 25 in Thurrock.

Their data shows there are currently 1,598 daily new cases of Covid-19.

Echo:

Epidemiologist Professor Tim Spector from King's College London is behind the study.

He said: "The news is the rates have continued to drop over the last week by around 18 per cent down to a level of around 1,600 new cases a day and to put this into perspective this means roughly one in 1,900 people has symptomatic Covid which is far away from where we were in January when about one in 30 in some areas had the disease.

READ MORE >>>

"And if we look at the map across Europe we can see how we are mirroring exactly what's going on in Israel who are ahead of us in the vaccination race and the levels there are very low.

Echo:

"I believe that fall from our peak in January is primarily due to our success in vaccination not just the lockdown, cases had started to fall before the lockdown.

"Certainly social distancing has help keep those levels down but I think the fact we are now up to 60 per cent vaccination we also have five or 10 per cent of the population have now natural immunity it's starting to give us this herd immunity tha we were dreaming of a year ago as a quick fix."