Britain announces 227 more coronavirus deaths

UK, (DAILY MAIL), 19 MAY 2020 - Britain today recorded another 227 coronavirus deaths, taking the UK’S total number of fatalities past 35,000.

Among the latest victims was a seven-year-old patient in England who had an undisclosed underlying health condition.

The preliminary figure - still to be confirmed - is calculated by adding up the individual updates from each of the home nations.

It takes the overall death toll to 35,023, although the Government has yet to reveal the final tally, which will be higher as it includes care home deaths in England.

However, separate grim figures released today by the Office for National Statistics estimate the true number of COVID-19 victims to be at least 44,000.

The Deparment of Health count only includes patients who have tested positive for the virus, whereas ONS adds patients whose death was suspected to be from the disease.

But even the ONS figure will be a modest estimate because it only covers England and Wales.

NHS England announced 174 more deaths in its hospitals today, while Scotland recorded 29 deaths in all settings, followed by Wales (17) and Northern Ireland (seven).

Figures show the daily deaths are consistently trending downwards - by comparison, there were 627 new fatalities last Tuesday and 693 the week before.

Officials yesterday declared 160 new deaths, the lowest tally since March 24 - the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the lockdown.

However, numbers released on Sundays and Mondays are usually smaller due to a delay in processing over the weekend.

It follows an Office for National Statistics report which today found at least 44,000 people have now been killed by COVID-19 in the UK.

And more than 11,000 victims - around a quarter of the total number of coronavirus victims - were care home residents in England and Wales.