Tayside and Fife’s virus death toll at 490

Latest numbers reveal breakdown of fatalities from Covid-19 since start of Scotland’s outbreak

New figures show almost 500 deaths across Tayside and Fife have been linked to coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.

The latest National Records of Scotland (NRS) data revealed that as of Sunday, 4,000 deaths registered in Scotland have been associated with Covid-19 – 490 between the two regions.

They emerged the day a key UK Government adviser said coronavirus deaths could have been halved if lockdown was introduced a week earlier.

Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, told the Science and Technology Committee: “The epidemic was doubling every three to four days before lockdown interventions were introduced.

“So, had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least half.”

The total number of deaths across Tayside and Fife between June 1 and June 7, in which the virus was mentioned on the death certificate,was 12. This is a drop on the 21 fatalities recorded the week before.

A regional breakdown shows 298 Scottish Covid-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic were in Tayside and 192 in Fife; taking the overall total for Courier Country to 490.

Of the overall Tayside death toll, 160 deaths were in Dundee, 72 were in Angus, and 66 were in Perth and Kinross.

A breakdown of the figure for Tayside shows that to date 147 deaths in the area linked to Covid-19 were in care homes, 125 were in hospitals and 26 were in homes or non-institutional settings.

In Dundee there were 80 Covid-19linked deaths in care homes, compared to 65 in hospitals and 15 in other locations. In Angus, 47 were in care homes, 19 in hospitals and six in other settings.

The figure for Perth and Kinross shows 20 care home deaths, 41 in hospitals and five in homes or noninstitutional settings. Fife saw 72 deaths in care homes, 104 in hospitals and 16 in other settings.

Last week’s NRS figure, which was valid up to May 31, showed 478 Covid-19 deaths across Tayside and Fife in total.

Of the overall Tayside death toll, 157 deaths were in Dundee, 66 were in Angus, and 66 were in Perth and Kinross, and 189 in Fife.

Across Scotland there were 89 Covid19 deaths registered between June 1 and June 7, a decrease of 42 on the week before. This is the sixth weekly reduction in a row.

The NRS figures include all cases where Covid-19 is mentioned on the death certificate and are distinct from the daily figures produced by Health Protection Scotland (HPS), which have so far included only individuals who have died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus.

This method recorded 4,000 deaths in Scotland linked to the virus as of June 7, compared to the 2,422 fatalities recorded by the HPS system at the time.

The Scottish Government is following a different strategy for emerging from lockdown from other nations in the UK, where rates of decline are varying.

When asked what went wrong with the UK-wide response, Prof Ferguson said: “I think two things... just before lockdown happened, the first two weeks of March, we probably had 1,500 to 2,000 infections imported from Italy and Spain, which we just hadn’t seen in the surveillance data.

“So there is much heavier seeding than we’d expected. The key things to determine number of deaths is at what point in your local epidemic you trigger interventions – how far in are you when you shut down transmission.

“We frankly had underestimated how far into the epidemic this country was, that’s half the reason.

“The second part, which I think would have been more avoidable, is about half of those deaths occurred in care homes,” he added.

“We did all this working under the assumption, which was government policy at the time, that care homes would be shielded from infection.

“We also made a rather optimistic assumption that somehow... the elderly would be shielded, the most vulnerable would be shielded as the top priority. And that simply failed to happen.”