Coronavirus: 315 die with COVID-19 in UK – as Gove admits ‘mistakes’ in government’s response

The number of people who have died with coronavirus in UK hospitals, care homes and the wider community has risen by 315, bringing the total number of fatalities to 28,446.

The official Department of Health figure, the lowest since the end of March, was offered by cabinet minister Michael Gove during Sunday’s Downing Street news briefing.

Mr Gove also revealed that 76,496 coronavirus tests were carried out in the 24 hours to 9am on Sunday – below the government’s target.

The target of 100,000 tests per day by the end of April had been met the previous two days.

And Mr Gove admitted there would be a time, when the virus was under control, for “deep and probing questions about lessons we can learn as a country from how we handled this crisis in its early stages”.

“Undoubtedly this government, like all governments, will have made mistakes,” he said.

Meanwhile, Professor Stephen Powis, the national medical director of NHS England, told the briefing that the current R number across the UK was around 0.7 – meaning the lockdown restrictions to slow the spread of the virus are working.

“R” is shorthand for reproductive rate and is a measure of how many people, on average, will catch the virus from someone who is infected.

Governments across the world see it as crucial, in terms of lifting lockdown restrictions, that R is below 1.

Answering questions later in the briefing, Mr Gove said he suspected the public would have to live with “some degree of constraint” until a vaccine is developed.

He suggested that lockdown measures may have to be targeted and reintroduced in certain regions where there are new outbreaks of the virus.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he will set out a “road map” for easing the lockdown later this week.

Mr Gove also confirmed that Britain would trial a new coronavirus tracking programme next week on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, in a bid to minimise the risk of a second wave of the infection.

“This week we will be piloting new test, track and trace procedures on the Isle of Wight with a view to having that in place more widely later this month,” he told the news conference.

Each home nation also disclosed the latest daily figures for hospital deaths on Sunday.

In England, the number of people who have died with the virus in hospitals has risen by 327 to 21,180. These figures are calculated over a different time period to those released by the Department of Health.

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The new system introduced last week, and run by PHE, gathers data in England from three sources and verifies them to avoid duplication.

Some of the deaths included in NHS England’s total on Sunday had already appeared in the UK numbers through PHE’s figures.

The explanation on the DHSC website says: “The daily count under the new measure may be lower than the old measure because some hospital deaths in the hospital-only data will include individuals who have already been included in the composite count. Individual deaths have already been reported in the PHE series on previous days.”

In Northern Ireland, five more people have died with COVID-19, bringing the total number of deaths to 381.

A further 14 people have died in Wales, taking the total number of deaths there to 983, Public Health Wales said.

Scotland deaths have risen by 12 to 1,571.

Earlier, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps admitted that fewer Britons would have died from coronavirus if more tests had been available earlier.

Speaking on The Andrew Marr Show, he said “many things” could have been different if the UK’s testing capacity was above 100,000 before COVID-19 spread in the country.

He added: “The fact of the matter is this is not a country that had – although we’re very big in pharmaceuticals as a country – we’re not a country that had very large test capacity.”

Mr Shapps told Sky News the NHSX contact tracing app, which will be rolled out later this month, requires 50%-60% of people to use for it to be successful.

This week Kay Burley will be hosting a live Q&A with Health Secretary Matt Hancock. You can put your questions to Mr Hancock about the coronavirus and its impact on your life live on Sky News.

Email us your questions – or you can record a video clip of your question on your phone – and send it to AskTheHealthSecretary@sky.uk

(c) Sky News 2020: Coronavirus: 315 die with COVID-19 in UK – as Gove admits ‘mistakes’ in government’s response