Britain announces 227 more coronavirus deaths – taking the country’s total fatalities to 35,023
- Officials yet to reveal final daily COVID-19 death toll, which is likely to be higher
- Preliminary tally calculated by adding up individual counts from home nations
- There were 627 new deaths last Tuesday, in more evidence crisis is slowing down
- Here’s how to help people impacted by Covid-19
Britain today recorded another 227 coronavirus deaths, taking the UK’s total number of victims past 35,000.
The preliminary figure – still to be confirmed- is calculated by adding up the individual updates from each of the home nations.
NHS England announced 174 more deaths in its hospitals today, while Scotland recorded 29 deaths in all settings, followed by Wales (17) and Northern Ireland (seven).
It takes the overall death toll to 35,023, although Department of Health chiefs have yet to reveal the final tally, which is likely to be higher as it includes care home deaths in England.
However, the true number of COVID-19 victims is likely to be more than 44,000, according to an Office for National Statistics report today.
The DH count only includes patients who have tested positive for the virus, whereas ONS adds patients whose death was suspected to be from the disease.
But even the ONS figure will be a modest estimate because it only covers England and Wales.
Figures show the daily deaths are consistently trending downwards – by comparison, there were 627 new fatalities last Tuesday and 693 the week before.
Officials yesterday declared 160 new deaths, the lowest tally since March 24 – the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the lockdown.
However, numbers released on Sundays and Mondays are usually smaller due to a delay in processing over the weekend.
In other developments to Britain’s coronavirus crisis today:
- Furious finger-pointing has broken out over the Government’s testing fiasco and failure to protect care homes as Cabinet minister Therese Coffey said blunders were down to ‘wrong’ science advice
- Greece became the first country to offer to waive 14-day quarantine for British tourists
- Iain Duncan Smith urged Boris Johnson to abandon two metre social distancing to ‘get the economy moving’
- Teaching unions have demanded special ‘bin maps’, paintbrushes and glue stick cleaning wardens in a 169-point shopping list before they will go back to work
- The number of unemployment benefit claims soared by 69%, rising by 856,500 to 2.1million after lockdown – despite furlough scheme that kept millions in work
- Elderly hospital patients with COVID-19 symptoms were discharged into care homes without tests before virus killed 10,000 pensioners, industry bosses say
Department of Health chiefs have yet to reveal the final toll, which is likely to be higher. The preliminary tally is calculated by adding up the individual counts of each of the home nations