Preparations for distributing a potential coronavirus vaccine are underway in Cheshire West, according to council leadership.

Chief Executive Andrew Lewis told CWAC's Covid-19 outbreak board that initial work had begun on the logistics of distributing the vaccine.

On Monday, pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer announced that a preliminary trial of its vaccine recorded a 90 per cent effectiveness rate in a cohort of 43,500 people.

Mr Lewis said: "We are turning our attention to the delivery of the vaccine by working with GPs to make sure they have the logistics support to deliver it to vulnerable populations.

"We are being cautiously optimistic. It has not yet got through the entire suite of tests. We do know that the delivery of this vaccine is quite challenging.

"It needs to be kept at very cold temperatures. A lot of this will be about the support of local GPs."

Dr Lesley Appleton, representing surgeries in the borough, added: "I think we would like to make plans to know exactly what we would need to do, but we are aware that this is coming and we will be ready.

"Things seem to run very smoothly with our flu vaccinations. Hopefully [we] will be in a similar position with administering the Covid-19 vaccine."

The meeting also saw an update on testing, with CWAC seeing a 2.1 per cent increase in the number of residents getting a swab.

In the last week, the borough saw 9.8 per cent of tests come back as positive, an rise of 0.7 per cent from the week before.