Britain today announced 183 more Covid-19 deaths, taking the official number of coronavirus victims to 38,344 – but it is the lowest Saturday total since before lockdown.
Department of Health officials have yet to confirm the final tally, which will be significantly higher because it takes into account fatalities in all settings. The preliminary toll is counted by adding up the individual death counts of each of the home nations.
NHS England chiefs today recorded 146 more coronavirus deaths in hospitals, while Scotland posted 22, Wales 14 and Northern Ireland one across all settings, including care homes.
Today’s death jump is the lowest on a Saturday since March 21 (56), just three days before the country went into lockdown. For comparison, 282 deaths were announced last Saturday.
Despite the continued downward trend, three of the Government’s coronavirus scientists claim the UK is lifting restrictions too soon and that 80 people could die every day until a vaccine comes along.
The reproduction ‘R’ rate – the average number of people an infected Covid-19 patient infects – is sitting between 0.7 and 0.9 and if it breaches 1 then the outbreak could spiral back out of control again. Ministers are trying to juggle both keeping the R number below 1 – to extinguish the spread of infection – and fire up the economy and return to normal life.
The current lockdown allows the public to travel to beauty spots to sunbathe with members of their household, or to meet one person from another household at a two-metre distance.
In other twists and turns in the coronavirus crisis today:
- Sun-seekers have been told they’ll be fined for breaking lockdown rules as Britons flock to beaches with temperatures set to hit 82F
- Senior Tories have demanded Boris Johnson reduces social distancing or see apocalyptic job losses in hospitality sector
- Scientists said picnickers must sit in the shape of a hexagon, pentagon or parallelogram two metres apart to stay safe in a social-distanced summer
- Ex-education secretary Alan Johnson claimed teaching unions ‘got it wrong’ over reopening schools and must now back down and stop their ‘war dance’
- Holidaymakers arriving in Mallorca and Ibiza could face coronavirus tests at the airport and then a six-hour wait in hotels for results
Professor Peter Horb, a member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), which is steering ministers through the crisis, said Britain could not afford to lose control of the virus.
He told BBC Radio 4 this morning: ‘We really can’t go back to a situation where we’ve got the numbers of cases and deaths we’ve had in the past.’
Sir Jeremy, director of the Wellcome Trust and SAGE member said in a Twitter post that he ‘agreed with John’ on the clear science advice, appearing to reference SAGE colleague Professor John Edmunds, who said on Friday the Government was ‘taking risks’ by relaxing measures from Monday.
Sir Jeremy also said the newly-introduced NHS test and trace system needed to be ‘fully working’ before measures were eased. He wrote: ‘Covid-19 spreading too fast to lift lockdown in England. Agree with John & clear science advice.
‘TTI (test, trace and isolate) has to be in place, fully working, capable dealing any surge immediately, locally responsive, rapid results & infection rates have to be lower. And trusted.’
Professor Edmunds, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said the Prime Minister had ‘clearly made a political decision’ by unlocking the country on Monday, because the threat of a second peak remains high.
He said that, even if the ‘untested’ contact tracing scheme goes smoothly, the country could still suffer 80 deaths a day until a vaccine is developed.
Professor Edmunds said: ‘Many of us would prefer to see the incidence driven down to lower levels because that then means we have fewer cases occurring before we relax the measures.
‘If we had incidence at a lower level then, even if R went up a little bit, we wouldn’t be in a position where we’re overwhelming the health service rapidly.
‘We could tolerate a little bit [of an increase in infections]. At the moment, with relatively high incidence,relaxing the measures and also with an untested track and trace system, I think we are taking some risk here.
‘Even if that risk does pay off, and we manage to keep the incidence flat, we’re keeping it flat at quite a high level – 8,000 new infections a day.
‘If there’s a 1 per cent infection fatality rate that’s 80 deaths per day, if there’s half a per cent, that’s 40 per day.
‘That’s the amount of deaths we might expect to see going forward. That’s clearly a political decision, it’s not a scientific decision.
‘It’s pretty clear to me the direction of travel is we’re starting to relax and we’re going to keep the reproduction level at one, but that means we’re keeping the incidence at this level.’