UK coronavirus cases nears 1,000,000 as death toll jumps by 274
Another 274 people have died with coronavirus in the UK, taking the official death toll past 46,000.
It’s the fourth day in a row that the daily death toll has been above, or close to, 300 but represents a slight drop on the 280 deaths recorded yesterday.
There were also 24,405 new cases reported in the last 24 hour period. This is slightly up from yesterday when there were 23,065.
Both figures are higher than last Friday, when there were 20,530 cases and 224 deaths.
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The latest numbers mean the UK has now very nearly seen a million confirmed cases of the virus since the start of the pandemic.
The official toll stands at 989,745 but many thousands of cases are not included because of a lack of testing early on.
Department of Health figures only record deaths of patients within 28 days of a positive test result. Office for National Statistics data shows 58,925 people have died with Covid-19 mentioned on their death certificate.
It comes as the deadline nears for Boris Johnson’s promise that the UK would have capacity to test 500,000 people a day ‘by the end of October.’
With one day of the month remaining, the latest data on the Government’s coronavirus dashboard shows that there is currently a capacity for 480,961 tests with 347,626 tests actually being processed.
Meanwhile, more cases and deaths linked to the pandemic have been recorded across all areas of the UK.
In Northern Ireland, there were nine deaths and 566 new cases of the virus in the latest 24 hour period. In Wales, there were 1,737 cases diagnosed and a further 11 deaths reported.
Scotland saw 28 deaths from coronavirus and 1,281 positive tests in the same time period.
ONS figures released earlier on Friday showed the number of people infected with coronavirus soared by almost a third last week.
A total of 568,100 people had Covid-19 in the week up to October 23, a 31 per cent rise on the figure of 433,300 reported in the previous week.
The figures suggest more than one in every hundred people in England are now infected.
In Manchester, one of the worst affected cities, there are fears hospitals could run out of intensive care beds ‘within days’.
The city is readying its Nightingale Hospital for use again and some hospitals are having to resort to turning operating theatres into makeshift ICUs.
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