UK passes 100,000 coronavirus deaths
More than 100,000 people have died in the United Kingdom after contracting the coronavirus, a year into Europe’s deadliest outbreak, figures from the government showed Tuesday.
The health department said 100,162 people have died after testing positive, including 1,631 new deaths reported Tuesday.
Britain is the fifth country in the world to record 100,000 virus-related deaths, after the United States, Brazil, India and Mexico, and by far the smallest.
The U.S. has recorded more than 400,000 COVID-19 deaths, the world’s highest total, but its population of about 330 million is about five times Britain’s.
The U.K. toll is more than twice as many people as were killed by German bombs in Britain in the 1940-41 Blitz, and 30,000 more than the total number of British civilians killed during the six years of World War II.
● In Poland, new statistics for 2020 show deaths spiked to a level unseen since World War II and births sharply declined, trends attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic and described by some as a demographic crisis. The data reported Tuesday by the daily newspaper Dziennik Gazeta Prawna came from a state register that includes weekly births and deaths.
Poland, a nation with a population of more than 38 million, registered 357,400 births last year, the lowest number since 2005, and some 486,200 deaths from various causes, the highest number registered since the war, in which Poland lost millions of citizens.
● The Dutch justice minister said people arrested during three nights of rioting sparked by the Netherlands’ new coronavirus curfew will face swift prosecution as the nation faced its worst civil unrest in years.
Minister Ferd Grapperhaus said rioters would be quickly brought before the courts by public prosecutors and will face possible prison terms if convicted.
“They won’t get away with it,” he said.
The rioting, initially triggered by anger over the country’s tough coronavirus lockdown, has been increasingly fueled by calls for rioting swirling on social media. The violence has stretched the police and led at times to the deployment of military police.