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. 

The daily Covid-19 death toll — the lowest since March 22, when 35 fatalities were recorded — is less than half the 111 fatalities registered last Monday.

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 this afternoon shows that 138,183 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 exact number of Brits who have been swabbed for the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been a mystery since May 22.

Separate statistics released by the Department of Health showed 1,205 more people tested positive for Covid-19 — which was the fewest since lockdown. Just 967 people were diagnosed on March 23.

It means the official size of the UK’s coronavirus outbreak now sits at 287,399 cases. However, the true scale of the crisis is estimated to be in the millions.

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

The daily 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.    

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 none today. 

But the Department of Health has a different time cut-off, meaning the daily updates from Scotland as well as Northern Ireland – which has also gone two days without a death – are always out of sync.