True Covid death toll has now passed 7,700
THE number of people who have lost their lives while suffering from coronavirus in Wales has now reached 7,764.
The sobering figure is revealed in the latest data from the Office for National Statistics and is usually treated as the true death toll as it includes all people whose cause of death mentioned Covid19 on their death certificate.
Data released by the ONS shows the second wave of the virus lasted longer than the first, and was more deadly.
The number of registered weekly Covid deaths has more than halved over the past two weeks in Wales and are now as low as they were at the beginning of October.
The new data released yesterday suggests that lockdown restrictions and the vaccine seems to be having an affect in Wales, with the latest weekly registered deaths involving Covid as low as 49.
This is a drastic decrease from nine weeks earlier, in January, when 467 deaths were registered in one week involving coronavirus, the most throughout the entire pandemic.
This is also the lowest the weekly number of Covid deaths has been since the beginning of October, which was the start of an increase in Covid deaths and cases and the beginning of the second wave.
Covid deaths during the first wave drastically increased in just four weeks, whereas the second wave of the virus saw Covid deaths increase slowly, taking 15 weeks to reach the peak of the second wave.
The data also shows a slight decrease in Covid deaths, which occurred at the end of November and beginning of December, as a result of the firebreak lockdown.
This suggests that the firebreak lockdown helped slow down the increase in deaths at this stage.
Now that we have a full year of data and now Covid deaths are returning to numbers seen at the beginning of the second wave, we can easily compare the impact of both the first wave of coronavirus and the second wave.
The data shows that the highest number of weekly deaths occurred just six weeks into the first wave of the pandemic, when 413 deaths were registered as involving the virus.
It then took a further 10 weeks to reach fewer than 50 weekly Covid deaths.
During this 16-week period, a total of 2,455 deaths were registered as involving coronavirus.
If we take a look at the second wave of the virus, we can see that an uptake in deaths began in September, but the numbers started to reach over 50 deaths per week by the middle of October.
The second wave lasted much longer than the first wave of the virus, with this period from the middle of October to the middle of March encompassing 23 weeks.
It took 14 weeks of weekly deaths rising before it reached the peak number of deaths on January 15, when 467 coronavirus deaths were registered in one week.
From October 16, 2020, to March 19, 2021, 5,100 deaths were registered as involving coronavirus.