Coronavirus UK: Death toll hits 33,186 with 494 new fatalities

Britain today announced 494 more COVID-19 deaths, taking the official number of victims past 33,000 as the UK’s curve continues to flatten.

The new deaths from across all settings is down on the 627 yesterday and is also the lowest tally recorded on a Wednesday for six weeks.

Official figures released by the Department of Health also show 3,242 more people tested positive for the coronavirus – the lowest daily jump since March.

It means 229,705 Britons have been struck down with the illness since the outbreak began. But the true number is likely to be in the millions.

It comes after grim figures published by the Office for National Statistics yesterday suggested the real number of victims could be thousands higher.

Analysis of the backdated ONS figures – which take into account suspected deaths and those that happen anywhere in the community – suggested the true death toll could be 45,000. Other data showed 50,000 ‘excess deaths’ have been recorded amid the pandemic.

The UK’s chief statistician, Sir Ian Diamond, today warned that the number of people dying is not falling as fast as officials had hoped now that the country is past the worst of the outbreak. He said Britain must be wary of a second wave.

Separate data shows that Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria has the highest rate of coronavirus infections for the size of its population, with 552 confirmed cases in a town of 67,000 people.

In other developments to Britain’s coronavirus crisis today: 

• Britons face years of higher taxes and pay freezes to cover the £300billion bill for coronavirus, leaked Treasury plans revealed as it emerged that one in three firms may never reopen;
• The UK economy contracted by 2 per cent in the first quarter of 2020 after plunging 5.8 per cent in March in the largest fall on record, as analysts expect even worse to come;
• The housing market reopened in a bid to get Britain moving again, with Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick urging estate agents to use online viewings; 
• Britons were pictured packed like sardines on trains and buses as they warned that social distancing was ‘next to impossible’ on the first day back to work for millions;
• Ministers are working with high street pharmacist Boots to recruit an army of volunteers to carry out coronavirus tests as Boris Johnson scrambles to hit his 200,000 checks a day target;
• Eight million ‘vulnerable’ workers who have underlying medical conditions or are old should not leave lockdown or Britain’s coronavirus death toll could rise to 73,000 within a year, a study warned;
• Police have warned people across Britain not to attend mass gatherings organised by an anti-vaxxing group which have allegedly been planned with picnics and live music in cities this Saturday. 

NHS England today confirmed 244 more people had died in its hospitals, aged between 49 and 99 years old. Four of them, the youngest of whom was 51, had no other health problems before catching COVID-19. 

Public Health Wales said a further 22 people have died after testing positive for coronavirus in the country, Scotland has announced 61 and Northern Ireland two.

Professor Diamond, who is head of the ONS, said ‘we need to be worried as a nation’ about the seeds of a second peak in the disease being sewn as the country eases its way out of the lockdown.

And he warned the full indirect effects of the coronavirus crisis in the UK may not be known for years, with deaths due to cancelled cancer screenings or a prolonged recession likely to only emerge in the long term.

Sir Ian told MPs this morning: ‘We are through the current peak. It does seem to me we need to be worried as a nation that as we come through this current peak we do not seed another one.’

He said there were a number of different epidemics – in the community, in care homes, and in hospitals – and the authorities had to ‘be able to be prepared to act in each of those areas’.

It was not only deaths directly due to COVID-19 that were a challenge, but also indirect deaths which may have resulted from causes including ‘reprioritisation in the health service’ as it adjusted to coronavirus.

Sir Ian – who also sits on the government’s SAGE panel – added: ‘What we are seeing, I think now, is a reduction in deaths in each of those areas but not at the moment as speedy as we would perhaps like.’

A grim analysis by experts at the London School of Economics has suggested that 22,000 people have already died in care homes as a result of the pandemic. 

Official data yesterday showed 8,314 COVID-19-related deaths had happened in care homes in England and Wales by the start of May.

But the LSE researchers fear that count is a huge under-estimate, and the true toll could be more than twice as high.

They said that care home residents taken into hospital before they died were not being counted properly, and that others who didn’t actually catch the virus may have died as a result of less available medical care or help with eating and drinking.

Their calculations took into account those home residents in hospitals, thought to make up 15 per cent of Britain’s official death toll.

And the bleak projection also included ‘excess deaths’ – the number of people dying compared to average – across the care industry as a whole. 

Dr Jose-Luis Fernández and PhD researcher Adelina Comas-Herrera’s report added: ‘Calculating total excess mortality in care homes since 28 December and adjusting this by the assumption that 15 per cent of care home residents die in hospital, suggests that by the 1st May there had been in excess of 22,000 deaths of care home residents during the COVID-19 pandemic in England and Wales.’ 

It comes as the Government is still under fire for not offering enough support to care homes during the crisis as the industry has accused it of rationing testing and protective equipment to focus its efforts on helping NHS hospitals.  

In Prime Minister’s Questions today, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer urged Boris Johnson to explain why there had been 10,000 ‘unexplained’ care home deaths in April.

Mr Starmer said: ‘The ONS records the average number of deaths in care homes each month. The last five years the average for April has been just over 8,000. 

‘This year the number of deaths in care homes for April was a staggering 26,000 – that’s three times the average – 18,000 additional deaths this April. 

‘Using the Government’s figures only 8,000 are recorded as COVID deaths, that leaves 10,000 additional and unexplained care home deaths this April.’        

The Prime Minister did not link the 10,000 deaths to the coronavirus response but admitted there was ‘much more to do’ to address the ‘tragedy’ hitting the industry.

Mr Johnson said: ‘Coronavirus is an appalling disease which afflicts some groups far more than others, I think the whole country understands. 

‘And in particular the elderly, and he’s right to draw attention, as I said, to the tragedy that has been taking place in care homes. 

‘The Office of National Statistics is responsible for producing the data that they have, the Government had also produced data which not only shows that there has been, as I said, a terrible epidemic in care homes but since the care homes action plan began we are seeing an appreciable and substantial reduction, not just in the number of outbreaks but also in the number of deaths.’

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in a tweet today: ‘We’re injecting a further £600 million for care homes with our infection control fund to protect residents and staff in our coronavirus battle’. 

Official figures published last night revealed that one of the most remote towns in the country has suffered more coronavirus cases per capita than anywhere else in England or Wales.

At least 552 people in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, have caught COVID-19 since the outbreak began in February, according to the latest Government data.

That gives the small industrial town of 67,000 people, tucked away on the on the Furness peninsula in the North West, a rate of 882 cases per 100,000 – or 0.88 per cent.

To put this into perspective, Barrow’s infection rate is more than double that of Wales (365), triple England’s (244) and Scotland’s (251) and quadruple the rate recorded in Northern Ireland (220). 

Figures show that Cumbria is also home to the area with the third highest infection rate. South Lakeland – east of Barrow-in-Furness – has a rate of 488 cases per 100,000 people.

And the town with the second-highest rate is Lancaster (753), which is located on the other side of Morecambe Bay in Lancashire.

Experts are puzzled as to why this part of the North West has turned into a hotspot for COVID-19 but local public health officials say it may be skewed by higher testing figures.

Today an inquest heard the death of a three-day-old baby was partially a result of the coronavirus after his mother tested positive just after the birth.

Coolio Carl Justin Morgan’s was born on May 2 in the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend, South Wales, with a low heart rate. He was transferred to Singleton hospital in Swansea but died three days later. 

The primary cause of death was listed as severe hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy, meaning the brain is starved of blood and oxygen, the BBC reports. 

Maternal Covid-19 was listed as a secondary cause, but it is not clear why Coolio’s mother’s COVID-19 was listed as a secondary cause of death, nor whether he was tested.

Hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy – which can cause brain damage or death without immediate medical intervention – is thought to occur in 0.1 per cent of all births.

HIE can be caused by low levels of oxygen in a mother’s blood, which is an effect that severe COVID-19 has been proven to have in adults. But there has so far been no research proving this can affect a baby in the womb.

No post-mortem examination was carried out and the coroner asked his officers to investigate the circumstances of the death ahead of the next hearing. The full hearing will be held in April next year.  

It comes just days after a six-week old baby died of Covid-19, becoming the UK’s youngest victim. NHS England said the infant died on May 3.

Figures earlier this week from an Oxford University suggest that pregnant women are no more at risk of severe illness from COVID-19 than women their age who are not pregnant.

Researchers found 427 mothers-to-be were admitted to NHS hospitals with the life-threatening disease between March 1 and April 14 – but only one in 10 were taken to ICU because they were critically ill. 

Five pregnant women have died with Covid-19. But Professor Marian Knight said the fate of the babies carried by the five women is unknown. 

Five babies in the study also died, three of which were ‘definitely’ not due to the virus. It could not be entirely ruled out the virus did not play a part in the death of the other two babies, but their official cause of death was not revealed.  

Although the cumulative death toll of the virus stands at 33,186 according to official Government figures, data from the Office for National Statistics suggests the true death toll could be 45,000. 

ONS data is based on death certificates collected from all settings, including where COVID-19 was included as contributor of death.

In the first six weeks of the outbreak, 108,345 deaths were registered in England and Wales – which is 46,494 more than the five-year average over the same period, ONS revealed. 

But COVID-19 was only responsible for 71.5 per cent – the remainder were not linked to the disease. It means there is an unusually high number of people dying this time of year than normal, which may have been caused by factors connected to the lockdown, such as delays in treatment for chronic conditions .

But the researchers at University College London and Cambridge University said yesterday this is set to rise much higher, potentially as high as 73,000 within a year. 

Their study, published in The Lancet, looked at the medical records of 3.8million people and predicted what could happen after lockdown – which is beginning to relax this week.  

If 10 per cent of people in England are allowed to catch the virus, the research team said – and four per cent are already thought to have done so – the death toll could double. 

It said vulnerable people – including all over-70s and those who have high blood pressure or asthma – make up 20 per cent, or 8million, of the British population.

Lead author Dr Amitava Banerjee stressed that this group people are not included in the ‘shielded’ group of ‘extremely clinically vulnerable’ – the 1.5million cancer patients and those with compromised immune systems who have been told to stay at home until the end of June.

The researchers modelled the normal one-year death risk for different groups of people, and then added in the additional effect of the pandemic on top of these risks.

They worked out how different levels of exposure to the virus after lockdown might affect the death risk, and therefore the number of people dying, differently.

In a ‘mitigation’ scenario in which some measures remain in place and 10 per cent of the population catches the virus – which appears to most closely resemble the way the UK is heading – they expected the total number of deaths to be between 37,000 and 73,000.

The coronavirus has spread too far in England for it to keep the death toll down to a ‘partial suppression’ or ‘full suppression’ level, which could have saved thousands of lives, the study showed.

It could be kept below 73,498 within the first year if no more than 10 per cent of the population are allowed to catch the virus. 

But if 80 per cent of the population caught the virus in a worst-case scenario, the researchers said, between 146,996 and 587,982 could die.