England has announced a further ten Covid-19 deaths, but Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have suffered no new victims.
Government officials are yet to confirm the early count, which is calculated by adding up deaths reported by each home nation.
England reported the ten deaths in NHS hospitals only. The figure does not include care homes, which will be in the official tally later.
No deaths were reported by the other three nations across any setting – hospitals, care homes and private homes.
New diagnosed cases will also be reported later this afternoon, expected to be the first time the figure will be correct in over a week.
A ‘technical issue’ between September 25 and October 2 meant that cases were underreported by almost 16,000, it was revealed this weekend.
Positive Covid-19 cases received their result, but their information was not given to NHS Test and Trace, and they were not logged on the Government dashboard for the public.
The Government’s coronavirus data dashboard says that the issue has been ‘resolved’ and Public Health England has said that ‘further robust measures have been put in place as a result’.
But the blunder will have led to an inevitable delay in some contacts of Covid-19 patients being reached, meaning thousands of infected people may have unknowingly been spreading the coronavirus.
England has announced a further ten Covid-19 deaths in the early count, taking the total to 42,360. The official number will be revealed by the Government this afternoon
Deaths can vary day-by-day and are normally lower on Sundays and Mondays because of a recording lag at the weekend — just 33 were announced yesterday compared to the rolling seven-day average of 52.
When taking into account the rolling-average, the trend has risen upwards consistently for the past few weeks. It was 30 last Sunday, 21 on September 20 and 11 on September 13.
The most up-to-date government coronavirus death toll updated this afternoon stood at 42,350. It takes into account victims who have died within 28 days of testing positive.
The deaths data does not represent how many Covid-19 patients died within the last 24 hours. It is only how many fatalities have been reported and registered with the authorities.
And the figure does not always match updates provided by the home nations. Department of Health officials work off a different time cut-off, meaning daily updates from Scotland and Northern Ireland are out of sync.
The toll announced by NHS England every day, which only takes into account fatalities in hospitals, doesn’t match up with the DH figures because they work off a different recording system.
For instance, some deaths announced by NHS England bosses will have already been counted by the Department of Health, which records fatalities ‘as soon as they are available’.
The government’s official toll is different to the figures compiled by the Office for National Statistics, which includes suspected fatalities where coronavirus was mentioned on a death certificate and not just lab-confirmed ones.
The ONS says some 52,500 people across England and Wales have died of suspected or confirmed Covid-19 this year.
And in its most recent report, published on Tuesday, revealed 139 people succumbed to the life-threatening disease in England and Wales in the week ending September 18, up 40 per cent from the 99 in the previous seven days.
But Covid-19 deaths announced each day by the Department of Health or by the ONS each week are nowhere near where they were at the start of the pandemic.
They have tumbled since the peak in April when more than 1,000 peope died on some days and hospitals were focusing their attention on hundreds of Covd-19 patients.
Currently the seven-day rolling average of new hospital admissions in England is 310. It’s been steadily rising since late August, but is still a far cry from the 2,700 or so admitted each day in the first week of April.
Confirmed Covid-19 cases are also nowhere near levels witnessed during the darkest weeks of the pandemic in March and April, when more than 100,000 Britons were estimated to be catching the virus every day.
Number 10’s lacklustre testing policy meant millions of cases were never counted, but researchers tracking the outbreak have been able to give an estimate retrospectively.
Predictions now say that between 8,400 and 20,000 people are being infected each day. The former figure is from ONS and the latter from King’s College London.
Efforts to remain on top of the coronavirus in Britain may have been seriously hampered this week after a computer glitch saw thousands of cases left off the tally.
Some 22,961 cases of coronavirus were reported on Sunday and 12,872 reported on Saturday. This compares with around 7,000 cases reported in the four preceding days.
Officials said the data published on October 3 and 4 are ‘artificially high’ because they include cases from as far back as September 25, but mostly in the past few days.
Public Health England last night admitted nearly 16,000 cases had been missed off its dashboard system in the space of a week.
The daily totals rocketed over the weekend after the ‘glitch’ resulted in officials adding on thousands of cases that were missed last week. However, the dashborad shows the dates the cases were reported, on Saturday and Sunday, rather than when the positive tests were found
It has since been revealed this was due to a master Excel spreadsheet reaching its maximum size, therefore cutting off thousands of cases.
The agency said in a statement that all those missing cases had been informed that they had the virus, as normal.
But tens of thousands of Britons have been ‘put at risk’ because of the delay in cases being passed on to NHS Track and Trace, according to reports.
PHE did not address the possible impact on NHS Track and Trace – with The Telegraph today reporting that the ‘stall’ in the system meant the missing cases were delayed in being passed on to Track and Trace call handlers.
There is no way of knowing the precise ramifications of the error.
But according to the paper, the issue left health officials desperately trying to hunt down contacts of the positive cases – some of which date back 10 days – in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Tens of thousands of close contacts are only being reached now, reports the paper, meaning that many of them could have been unknowingly carrying the virus, when they should have been told to self isolate.
The admission by PHE that the figures had been missed suggests the pandemic is growing faster than previously thought, with low figures last week giving the impression the outbreak was actually slowing down.
Asked on Monday how many contacts of positive coronavirus cases had been missed as a result of the error, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told reporters in central London: ‘I can’t give you those figures.
‘What I can say is all those people are obviously being contacted and the key thing is that everybody, whether in this group or generally, should self-isolate.’
Dr Duncan Robertson, lecturer in management sciences and analytics at Loughborough University and fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, said the error was ‘an absolute scandal’.
He tweeted: ‘These individuals will not have had their contacts identified and those contacts may have become infectious and may have been spreading the virus.’
Paul Hunter, professor of health protection at the University of East Anglia, said ‘there will be occasional glitches’ in a system this size, but added: ‘I think the thing that surprised me was the size of it – almost 16,000 results going missing over the course of a week is quite alarming, I think.’
Prof Hunter told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘If you’re going to do your contact tracing, there is a very short timeframe in which you can do it effectively.
‘And the reason is that we know now that this infection is most infectious at around the time people develop symptoms – so very early on in the illness – and if you’re going to therefore identify contacts … it really needs to be done within a matter of a day or so if you’re going to actually have any effect.’
Rowland Kao, professor of veterinary epidemiology and data science at the University of Edinburgh, said the contacts of those affected will ‘have already contributed extra infections which we shall see over the coming week or so.’
Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said the error was ‘shambolic’, adding that ‘people across the country will be understandably alarmed.’
According to data published on Sunday night, the weekly rate of new Covid-19 cases has soared in dozens of areas of England, following the addition of nearly 16,000 cases that had previously been unreported nationwide.
Manchester now has the highest rate in England, with 2,740 cases recorded in the seven days to October 1.
It’s the equivalent of 495.6 cases per 100,000 people, more than double the 223.2 in the previous week.
Liverpool has the second highest rate, up from 287.1 to 456.4, with 2,273 new cases. Knowsley is in third place, up from 300.3 to 452.1, with 682 new cases.
Other areas recording sharp increases include Newcastle upon Tyne (up from 256.6 to 399.6, with 1,210 new cases); Nottingham (up from 52.0 to 283.9, with 945 new cases); Leeds (up from 138.8 to 274.5, with 2,177 new cases); and Sheffield (up from 91.8 to 233.1, with 1,363 new cases).
It is not clear if the latest increase in cases will trigger further government intervention.
Mr Johnson said the updated figures meant that the prevalence of the virus was where experts had expected it to be and it would soon be apparent if extra restrictions were having the intended impact.
‘The incidence that we are seeing in the cases corresponds to pretty much where we thought we were,’ he said.
‘And, to be frank, I think that the slightly lower numbers that we’d seen, you know, didn’t really reflect where we thought the disease was likely to go, so I think these numbers are realistic.’