No new Covid-19 deaths for second time this week

NO new coronavirus deaths have been reported in Wales in a day for a second time this week.

Public Health Wales (PHW) confirmed yesterday there were zero confirmed deaths reported with lab-confirmed Covid-19, keeping the overall death toll at 1,540.

It is the second time in four days that there have been no new deaths reported in the previous 24 hours following the same announcement on Monday.

At the peak in early April, there was one day when Wales saw 110 deaths reported in a single day, although there had been a delay reporting some of these to PHW.

As it can take several days for deaths to be reported to PHW, the statistics for when deaths happened – as opposed to when they were reported – are slightly different.

So far it appears there have been two days when there were no deaths in a true 24-hour period June 18 and July 3.

No deaths have yet been reported on Wednesday and Thursday however it is very possible that the paperwork for deaths on those days would not yet have reached PHW. There were in fact two deaths on the first day – Monday – that no deaths were reported in the daily update.

The true death toll where the virus was mentioned on a death certificate was 2,438 by June 26, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

In addition, PHW said the number of labconfirmed positive cases of coronavirus in Wales has increased by 10 to bring the total to 15,939.

The number of daily positive cases has been on the decline in recent days with 16 reported on Thursday, 13 on Wednesday, seven on Tuesday, and eight on Monday.

The PHW dashboard has stopped revealing on a daily basis where the new cases are.

Since the outbreak began, the Cardiff local authority has had the most positive cases (2,255), followed by RCT (1,709) and Swansea (1,799).

However, Merthyr Tydfil has had the highest cases per 100,000 population (896.8), followed by Denbighshire (753.4) and RCT (745.7).

By contrast, Ceredigion has only had a total of 59 cases since March (81.2 cases per 100,000 population) – by far the lowest of any local authority.

Even though testing capacity stands at 15,000 each day in Wales just 2,632 tests were carried out on Thursday.