1,000 COVID DEATHS

UK records worst daily total since April

COVID deaths topped 1,000 yesterday for the first time since April.

A total of 1,041 new deaths were reported across the UK as well as another 62,322 positive tests.

The number of patients in hospital has doubled in the past month and now stands at 30,451. This is 40 per cent higher than the first wave peak of 21,684.

In total, more than 77,000 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus. The highest daily death toll is 1,072 on April 8.

The bleak figures show restrictions are yet to have any effect in slowing the pandemic.

The infection rate has soared 40 per cent over the past week and random testing shows around one in 50 people currently have the virus.

In London, the worst-affected region, the seven- day infection rate is now at 1,012 per 100,000. One month ago, it was just 167.

Doctors warned the NHS is facing the hardest month in its 73-year history, with more than 3,000 patients a day being admitted to hospital.

All NHS regions apart from the North West are now treating more Covid cases than at any point during the first wave. Two of the seven NHS England regions – the South East and East of England – are treating double the number of patients as in the first wave.

The chief executive of the NHS in Wales yesterday said the country could soon be treating twice as many as in the first wave.

Dr Andrew Goodall said Wales’s critical care units were operating at 140 per cent of normal capacity and two health boards were dedicating almost half their beds to patients with the virus.

He added: ‘ We are not able to deliver a complete range of NHS services with such high rates of coronavirus in our communities or hospitals. The four chief medical officers have raised real concerns about the risk of the NHS becoming overwhelmed in several areas of the UK.’

Nine NHS England trusts currently have at least half of their beds occupied by Covid patients.

Some patients have been transferred miles away – even to Scot

‘Possibly hardest month for NHS’

land – because hospitals are so full. At Whittington Hospital and North Middlesex hospital, both in London, nearly two thirds of all inpatients have Covid.

Intensive care consultant Dr Matt Morgan, who works at the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, said: ‘I think January will be the hardest month in the pandemic so far. Possibly, the hardest month in the 73 years since Aneurin Bevan started the NHS.

‘ That’s not just for ICU. It’s important to know about the medical wards, the respiratory wards, the whole hospital system.’

Experts have warned deaths and hospitalisations will keep rising throughout January due to the lag between getting infected and becoming severely ill.

Kevin McConway, Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics at the The Open University, said: ‘Some hospitals in certain parts of the country are already pretty full.

‘The lockdown announced yesterday will reduce new infections, and vaccination might possibly start to reduce new infections. But those effects won’t show up in hospital admissions for another two or three weeks, because it generally takes time after they are infected for people to become ill enough to need hospital treatment.

‘People going into hospital now could well have been infected two or three weeks ago, when the proportion of people infected was more like 1 in 80 than the current 1 in 50. The numbers needing hospital care are going to keep rising.

‘If they do double in the next three weeks, as more people who are already infected need hospitalisation, things are going to get very difficult in hospitals across a lot of the country.’