The UK has seen a sharp jump in coronavirus deaths with 381 more people dying from the illness despite moves to rein in the spread of the pandemic.
The latest deaths reported over the 24 hours to 5pm on Monday increased the UK’s death toll to 1,789 from coronavirus, according to health department figures. The UK has 25,150 cases diagnosed.
The latest bad news on deaths in recent days came after the Office for National Statistics reported earlier on Tuesday that many more people had been dying with coronavirus than hospital figures showed.
Although its data was almost two weeks old, it showed that by March 20, it had seen evidence of 210 deaths where Covid-19 was cited by an attending doctor as a potential factor compared with 170 people that the Department of Health and Social Care recorded as dying in hospital from the virus.
The ONS said its number “is higher than the figures the [health department] publish as it includes deaths related to Covid-19 that took place outside of hospitals and those not tested for Covid-19”.
The 210 figure is likely to rise as more deaths are recorded and registered on national systems, a process which can take some time.
Explaining the differences between the ONS data and the daily figures published by the NHS, Sarah Caul, head of mortality analysis at the ONS, said the statistical agency’s figures were “the most accurate and complete information”.
“Using the complete death certificate allows us to analyse a lot of information, such as what other health conditions contributed to the death,” she added.
The statistical agency gave more details of the deaths it recorded in the week ending on March 20, where it had details of 103 death registrations mentioning coronavirus.
In line with other countries, men were more likely than women to die from Covid-19 with 60 per cent of the deaths recorded being male. Almost 70 per cent of the deaths were of people over 85 years old. Only seven of the 103 deaths recorded were of people under the age of 65.
In that week, the number of deaths overall in the UK was 10,645, a decrease of 374 compared with the previous week, but the statistics agency said that it was slightly higher than the average of 10,573 for the same week over the previous five years.
This level of deaths would not be seen as an abnormal rate or statistically significantly above the usual number. Coronavirus was mentioned as the cause of death in only 1 per cent of cases.
The data come from a period when the outbreak was just starting to kill a large number of people in the UK. In that week, before the lockdown started, there were few deaths reported by the Department of Health and Social Care from Covid-19.
