When we get the Covid messenger stats one of the things I do is go through the rising groups and look for areas where there are significant rises in more than one LA.
I noted down Cambridgeshire and Buckinghamshire over a week ago as having a number of areas with notable rises. Bucks seems to have settled down though, so I wonder whether Cambs will too.
Currently most of the rises are just little wiggles-if my family started coughing, got tested and were all positive, we'd approximately quadruple our LA's numbers for the day, which would almost certainly mean a rise, so you're looking for more than just that.
For me, North Yorkshire is an area of interest currently.
Selby has gone in a week from 49 to 111, and Craven from 28 to 44, and York from 11 to 23, all of which are significant rises.
One thing is that I don't think those areas were as badly effected in the January wave. It was something that I wondered, whether the areas which hadn't had as high a proportion of the Kent variant before we locked down in January, would find they were more susceptible to it taking off when reopened?
But we do have to take the figures in context. Other than Selby, everyone else is under 70/100k. This means that we are going to see rises when there are mini outbreaks, which should then sink again. I suspect there's also a fact that people will be more likely to get tested if they know they've been in contact or there's an outbreak nearby, which means they may stay up for longer.
The thing (I hope) the government will be looking out for is patterns, which would be sudden sustained rises, and especially any significant outbreaks among vaccinated groups.