Britain announces more Covid-19 deaths

Britain today announced 55 more Covid-19 deaths in the lowest daily toll since before lockdown, as Scotland and Northern Ireland both recorded no new fatalities for the second day in a row.

Department of Health bosses say the official number of victims now stands at 40,597 — but separate grim reports say the true number of coronavirus fatalities is actually thousands higher.  

Death figures released on Sundays and Mondays are always much lower than those recorded throughout the rest of the week because of a delay in recording deaths at the weekend.  

And the statistics do not always match the figures given by each of the home nations, who work to their own time cut-offs. For instance, NHS England today recorded 59 deaths in hospitals alone.

Officials have yet to release the figures showing the geographical breakdown of deaths in the UK. But neither the health body of Scotland or Northern Ireland have recorded a death in the last two days.

In other coronavirus developments in Britain today:

• Boris Johnson has earmarked June 22 as the date when pubs and restaurants across the nation could be allowed to reopen, it was claimed;
• Tourists will be allowed to travel freely across the EU by mid-July, as the government plans to water-down its travel quarantine policy as quickly as possible;
• Passengers arriving at London Heathrow Airport criticised the UK’s new quarantine rules, claiming that they are unenforceable and will be difficult to police;  
• Travellers ignored police advice and arrived at the site of Appleby horse fair even though Europe’s biggest gathering of gipsies has been cancelled this year;
• More than seven million people have now been infected with coronavirus across the world – and two in every three cases are in Europe and the US.

Department of Health data released yesterday show that 142,123 tests were carried out yesterday, including antibody tests for frontline NHS and care workers.  

But bosses again refused to say how many people were tested, meaning the number of Brits who have been swabbed has been a mystery since May 22.

Separate statistics released by the Department of Health showed 1,326 more people tested positive for Covid-19 – which was also the fewest since lockdown.

It means the official size of the UK’s outbreak now sits at 286,194 cases. However, the true scale of the crisis is estimated to be in millions.

The 77 Covid-19 deaths announced yesterday was around 32 per cent lower than the 113 recorded last Sunday. It is also down a similar amount from the Sunday two weeks ago (118 deaths).

The data does not represent how many Covid-19 patients died in the last 24 hours – it is only how many fatalities have been reported.   

Breakdown of the figures showed 65 deaths occurred in England, followed by six in Scotland, five in Wales and one in Northern Ireland. 

However, the data does not always match the updates provided by each of the home nations. For example, the Scottish government yesterday announced no new deaths and six on Saturday. 

But the Department of Health has a different time cut-off, meaning the daily updates from Scotland as well as Northern Ireland are always out of sync.