England, Scotland and Wales have announced 601 more hospital patients have died of the coronavirus.
The new fatalities take the total number of fatalities in the UK to 22,279.
A full-UK roundup is expected later today from the Department of Health, which has pledged to include care home and non-hospital victims for the first time.
The Department posted on Twitter that the new statistics, expected to include a ‘substantial’ number of care home residents, will be published later this afternoon.
When the non-hospital deaths are included in today’s count they will be backdated into early March and are expected to cause a surge of thousands in the UK’s total death toll. Today’s daily count is expected to increase but remain in the hundreds.
It comes as the number of people dying in care homes is soaring and one expert from the University of Cambridge said more people may now be dying in homes than in hospitals.
Sir David Spiegelhalter made the shocking claim yesterday after the Office for National Statistics released its weekly data showing thousands of people are dying out of hospital and not being counted until weeks later.
The professor, a highly regarded statistics expert and an OBE recipient, said he believes the numbers of care home deaths are still climbing as Government statistics show hospital fatalities are trailing off. He spoke of a ‘massive, unprecedented spikes’ in the number of people dying in nursing homes.
The number of residents dying of any cause has almost tripled in a month, from around 2,500 per week in March to 7,300 in a single week in April – more than 2,000 of the latter were confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Care Quality Commission (CQC) reports suggest care homes are now seeing around 400 coronavirus deaths each day, on average – a number on par with hospitals in England.
Government ministers, pressured on claims they didn’t do enough to help care homes, insist they were ‘not overlooked’ during a scramble to protect the NHS. Environment Secretary George Eustice said this morning ‘we have always recognised there was more vulnerability there’. He denied that more testing would have saved lives.
While deaths in hospitals have been steadily decreasing – 586 were announced yesterday, down from 980 at the outbreak’s peak – nursing homes could still be in the depths of their crises. The way data is backdated means that the true picture is unclear because we currently only have statistics from two weeks ago.
Analysis of data from the Office for National Statistics shows that, as the number of hospital deaths being reported has declined (blue bar), the number of fatalities being recorded outside of hospitals – mainly in care homes – has risen (red bar). The data used has been backdated and counted by actual date of death, making it appear more stable than the erratic numbers announced each day by the Department of Health, which are counted by the date they are registered
People dying in care homes now account for 39 per cent of all coronavirus fatalities in Scotland, with hospital patients making up only half of victims
In Scotland, deaths in hospitals now only account for half of the total. National Records of Scotland today revealed 2,272 people had died of COVID-19 by April 26. 1,188 of those people died in hospital, 886 died in care homes and 198 died at home or elsewhere. If the same ratio applies to the entire UK, the real death toll could already be more than 41,600 when non-hospital fatalities are included.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night promised that the Department of Health would count and publish care home deaths for the UK on a daily basis starting from today. Professor John Newton, the Government’s testing chief, said the public should expect a ‘substantial’ number of deaths.
The true scale of the crisis in care homes has also been masked by a lack of routine testing, meaning thousands of elderly residents may have died without ever being diagnosed. Professor Newton yesterday said officials had been working on the assumption that if one person tested positive for COVID-19 in a home then anyone else who developed symptoms probably also had it and didn’t need testing.
Professor Carl Heneghan, an University of Oxford medicine expert who has been studying Government statistics, believes at least a third of care homes have suffered outbreaks.
Families were for weeks left devastated by restrictions preventing them from visiting unwell and dying relatives, until rules were relaxed recently to allow people to say goodbye to their loved ones. One carer in Peterborough, Laura Dunn-Green, filmed the ‘very emotional’ moment she read out a goodbye letter to an 86-year-old resident after it was sent in by her granddaughter, who was unable to visit her because of the coronavirus lockdown.
Government ministers are now having to fend off accusations that they left the 400,000 people living in care homes in the lurch in the early stages of Britain’s epidemic when they focused their efforts on NHS hospitals.
Chief government scientist Sir Patrick Vallance admitted this week that Whitehall was told ‘very early on’ – believed to be late January or early February – that care homes would be a danger zone. The Government has been accused of ‘shambolic’ and haphazard’ attempts to support the sector since then and the first death wasn’t announced until March 31.