Coronavirus UK: Death toll hits 3,605 with 38,168 cases

The UK has announced 684 more coronavirus deaths today, taking the total number of fatalities to 3,605. 

Yet again the number is a record one-day high – this has been the case almost every day this week, with each day since Tuesday announcing more victims than the last.

Yesterday there were a record 569 new fatalities announced by the Department of Health and today’s statistics show a rise 20 per cent larger.

The new numbers mean the number of people dead from COVID-19 in the UK has risen five-fold in a week, from just 759 last Friday, March 27.

The numbers behind the UK’s crisis have escalated rapidly over the past seven days and Health Secretary Matt Hancock today admitted that next week is likely to be worse still, potentially topping out at more than 1,000 deaths per day by Easter Sunday. 

Britain is still being hammered by the consequences of huge numbers of people catching the coronavirus before the country went into total lockdown last week. The increases being seen each day are ‘expected’, scientists say.

Experts say it could take another couple of weeks before the benefits of social distancing start to show in NHS statistics – but they insist that the outbreak will taper off and the daily numbers will start to fall.

And insiders maintain that the NHS, by and large, is coping well with the strain so far and there are still intensive care beds and ventilators available for patients who need them. 

In other developments in the worldwide coronavirus crisis:

• Global coronavirus cases soared past one million as the pandemic explodes in the US and the death tolls continue to climb in Italy and Spain;
• The family of Britain’s youngest coronavirus victim – 13-year-old Ismail Mohamed Abdulwahab – will not be able to attend his funeral because they are in self-isolation after his brother and sister developed symptoms;
• A frontline nurse – 36-year-old Areema Nasreen – died after testing positive for coronavirus, becoming the country’s youngest health worker to be killed with the disease; 
• The Prince of Wales officially opened the new NHS Nightingale Hospital for intensive care coronavirus patients, saying from 530 miles away that it was a message of hope for those who may need it most; 
• Health chiefs urged locked-down Britons to continue staying at home to help fight the coronavirus pandemic this weekend as a mini-heatwave is due to sweep the country;
• Heathrow Airport announced it will remain operational with one runway amid falling flight numbers and fury from passengers at lack of medical advice when they arrive back from coronavirus hotspots.

Public Health England said 173,784 people have now been tested for the coronavirus – 7,651 people were tested yesterday, Thursday, a total of 11,764 times. 

And NHS England, which collects data on the deaths which happen in England, said 604 of the new fatalities happened in its hospitals, with patients aged between 24 and 100.

Thirty-four of the patients had been healthy before they caught COVID-19 and they ranged in age from 27 and 92, reiterating that young people with no long-term illnesses can still be killed by the infection.

Tributes have today been pouring out to 36-year-old nurse and mother of three in Walsall, Areema Nasreen, who died today in the hospital where she had worked before becoming ill – Walsall Manor Hospital in the Midlands.

A change in the information published by the NHS today has seen the health service shift away from naming the hospitals where patients have died and the dates they died on. Instead it has shifted to regional totals as the numbers become too large for specific details to be realistic.

It revealed that today’s death toll includes 161 patients in London, 150 in the Midlands, 88 in the North West, 66 in the East of England, 62 in the North East & Yorkshire, 41 in the South East and 36 in the South West.

Scotland today announced 46 more fatalities, Wales 24 and Northern Ireland 12.

The totals of all countries’ separate counts add up to more than the official total for the UK because the Department of Health stops recorded at 5pm the day before it publishes the statistics. Some of the deaths outside of England will be counted in tomorrow’s total for Britain. 

Health Secretary Matt Hancock today warned the UK’s coronavirus outbreak could peak over the Easter weekend and by next Sunday up to 1,000 people a day could be dying from the deadly disease.

Mr Hancock said it was ‘perfectly possible’ that the current numbers of deaths being seen each day could double next week.

It came after he was forced to admit his pledge to boost COVID-19 testing capacity to 100,000 per day by the end of April did not include antibody kits, which are seen as crucial to getting the UK back up and running because they can reveal who has had, and is now immune to, the coronavirus.

Number 10 yesterday performed a screeching U-turn on its testing policy as it abandoned the previous centralised approach by health chiefs and finally invited the wider science and medical research sectors to help, with private labs now joining the effort to process thousands of swab tests.

But the Government’s shambolic handling of the testing crisis was today exposed by scientists and commercial laboratories, who claimed they offered to help the government two weeks ago to increase antigen testing – which only tells if someone is currently infected – but were ignored.

Increasing swab testing – sometimes called antigen testing – is viewed as crucial because it allows officials to test more self-isolating health workers and to say for certain whether they have the disease, allowing those who do not to return to the NHS frontline.

Public Health England is believed to be assessing up to 150 different antibody tests but several kits have already failed medical checks, including one that was wrong 75 per cent of the time. 

Officials have not revealed how accurate the tests need to be before they will finally give them the green-light.

Manufacturers of antibody tests who have sent them to PHE for assessment today said there was still no clarity on whether their kits were going to be used despite some claiming their devices are 98 per cent accurate. 

An Essex-based maker of DIY kits claimed officials won’t even look at its product because it is a self-test, as opposed to one used by medics.

The UK is able to conduct antibody tests at its specialist military laboratory at Porton Down in Wiltshire. Some 3,500 of those tests are currently being carried out each week as part of a population sampling effort to establish how many people have had coronavirus. But that test is laboratory-based and allegedly cannot be scaled up.

Explaining the sluggishness in hiking test numbers, Mr Hancock said approving faulty tests would put people at risk.

‘I understand why NHS staff want tests, so they can get back to the frontline. Of course I do,’ he said at the Government’s briefing last night.

‘But I took the decision that the first priority has to be the patients for whom the result of a test could be the difference in treatment that is the difference between life and death

‘I believe anybody in my shoes would have taken the same decision.’

First Minister for Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, said in a briefing today that her ministers have not found a reliable antibody test either.

She said Scottish Government’s targets on testing are proportionally equal to what is being done in the rest of UK, although the expansion to allow 3,500 tests per day in Scotland is slightly higher proportionally.

The Scottish Government is looking at how antibody testing  – which can tell if a person has previously had the virus – can move Scotland out of lockdown, although the test does not currently exist in a ‘reliable form’, the Ms Sturgeon added.

A testing oversight group has been set up by the Scottish Government, she announced, which has been tasked with monitoring the provision of tests for the disease.

The group will be responsible for the increase in capacity of the labs in Scotland, along with the Scottish side of the delivery of the UK initiative to allow ‘non-NHS testing’.

Scientists in private labs at research companies and universities across the UK now say that they had offered to help the Government with swab testing weeks ago but never heard back.

Unofficial labs could have been processing thousands of coronavirus tests for weeks, they say, if they had been enlisted.

The COVID-19 testing row erupted this week after Germany scaled up its testing capability to 93,000 per day while the UK was still managing fewer than 10,000.

Public Health England, a government body separate from the Department of Health, is facing the burden of blame for insisting on developing its own tests and analysing results in its own eight laboratories along with around 40 NHS sites.  

Academics and private sector scientists, however, say they have the machines capable of interpreting swab tests if they were given the right information.

There are believed to be thousands of the machines – PCR machines – ready and waiting in laboratories around the country and many owners are willing to help test NHS staff to help them keep working.

Some have already taken matters into their own hands and begun testing medical workers in their local areas.

The scientists are capable of doing PCR tests, which look for evidence of the coronavirus inside people’s DNA and are different to antigen tests, which also test for current infection but do so by trying to trigger a reaction from viruses in a sample.

One man running a fully-equipped lab in Leicester told The Times his firm had offered to help the Government but was now testing private clients on its own.

He said: ‘We approached the NHS on March 17 to offer our assistance and said we were happy to use all our capacity for NHS work and we’ve been trying to get a response since then.’

Mr Dunn said the lack of smaller labs being involved in the testing effort was ‘a bit of a travesty’.

He thinks his lab alone could work up to completing 1,500 tests per day.

The tests in question are called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests and sample people’s DNA to look for traces of the coronavirus’s genetic material which have got mixed in, showing whether they are currently infected with the virus.

They rely on PCR machines which are widely used in biological sciences for their ability to examine DNA.

A former regional director of Public Health England (PHE), John Ashton, said the body’s handling of the testing programme had been a ‘fiasco’.

Scientists at the University of Oxford, one of the world’s top institutions, said they also had not had their offers of help taken up by British authorities.

Matthew Freeman, a biologist at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University said in a tweet: ‘We have many people experienced in PCR.

‘We’d love to help and have been trying to volunteer for weeks. Must be many university departments and institutes in similar position.’

Another lab at Oxford – the Butt Group, which studies genetics – added on Twitter: ‘I echo this sense of frustration: we volunteered on day 1 and beyond being asked 3 times to list our expertise, have heard nothing.’

Marc Dionne, a researcher at Imperial College London, replied: ‘Many from Imperial in the same position.’

Amid the backlash, some institutions are forging their own relationships with local NHS workers.

The Francis Crick Institute in London, one of the country’s foremost biomedicine labs, announced yesterday it is carrying out tests for staff at the Imperial College London Hospitals nearby.

It said it could scale up to 500 tests per day by next week and hopefully to 2,000 daily in the long run.

Speaking on Radio 4 yesterday the institute’s CEO, Sir Paul Nurse, urged the Government to let ‘small ship’ private labs help out with the massive testing effort.

Referring to the famous Second World War evacuation of UK forces from the French coast, Sir Paul said: ‘A metaphor here is Dunkirk, to be honest. We are a lot of little boats and the little boats can be effective.

‘The government has put some bigger boats – destroyers – in place. that is a bit more cumbersome to get working and we wish them all the luck to do that.

‘But we little boats can contribute as well.’

Sir Paul said the smaller labs were ‘more agile’ to deal with global shortages of reagents. ‘We can make pipelines of reagents and chemicals,’ he said.

‘We can move faster to deal with issues. Of course we have supply chain problems but we can reduce them by being small and agile.’

The Government yesterday hit back at claims that it has been too slow to act and accusations of control-freakery.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who last night pledged England would scale up to 100,000 tests per day by the end of April, said the Government was working hard to make sure the tests it uses are the best they can be.

Professor Chris Whitty, chief medical adviser to the Cabinet, has said in the past that the only thing worse than no test is a bad one.