UK care home deaths from coronavirus soar

LONDON: Nearly 6,400 people with coronavirus have died in care homes in England, with numbers still rising even as the wider outbreak slows, new figures showed on Tuesday.

Although care home deaths are now included in the official daily toll, the new data suggests the national figure is underestimating the full extent of the outbreak in Britain -- one of the worst affected countries.

Care homes reported 6,391 deaths where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate to the Care Quality Commission watchdog between April 10 and May 1. Some 2,044 of those were reported in the last week of that period -- when Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that Britain was “past the peak” of its outbreak.

Total deaths in care settings, including those not related to Covid-19, are also significantly higher than the five-year average for this time of year.

“Almost four times more deaths than we would expect to see at this time of year were registered in that last week,” Nick Stripe, head of health analysis at the ONS, told the BBC.

The Department of Health said on Monday that 28,734 people in Britain had died with coronavirus, almost on a par with Italy, the worst-hit country in Europe. But the new ONS figures showed 27,356 deaths by April 24 alone in England and Wales, where coronavirus was mentioned on the death certificate. Stripe warned against comparing the figures with other countries’ death tolls. “No country reports on death registrations data as fast, frequently, or to such breadth and depth as we can in the UK,” he wrote in a message on Twitter.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has conceded there is a “huge amount of work still to do” to reduce Covid-19 death rates in care homes. Hancock said the number of deaths is “still far too high” after telling MPs the government is working “resolutely to defeat the coronavirus”. Hancock, responding to an urgent question from shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth, said: “We’ve now built a national testing infrastructure of scale and because we have this extra capacity we’ll be delivering up to 30,000 tests a day to residents and staff in elderly care homes, making sure that symptomatic staff and residents can all be tested.”