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Britain today recorded another 13,430 coronavirus infections and 603 deaths as the second wave of the disease continues to decline.
Statistics from the Department of Health show that Covid cases were slightly higher today than the 11,299 published last Monday, which was considered a mistake because it was unusually low. The outbreak in the UK has been shrinking for more than fifteen days because the lockdown thwarted the virus.
Deaths have only just begun to stabilize due to the delay it can take among patients who become infected and seriously ill. Another 603 laboratory-confirmed coronavirus deaths were confirmed today, slightly down from 608 last week.
Separate government data, which looks at when a death occurred rather than when it was recorded, shows that deaths began to decline after November 21.
Meanwhile, slightly older statistics, including suspected and laboratory-confirmed deaths, show that the curve is slowing. A weekly report from the Office for National Statistics showed that the number of people who died with Covid-19 in the week ending November 20 was 2,697, up from 2,466 the week before.
This was a rise of just nine percent after a 27 percent increase a week earlier when they rose from 1,937, and a 53 percent increase in mid-October after the second wave got out of hand. The slowdown rate shows that the worst of Britain’s second wave is over and deaths may have peaked and are now falling again.
Deaths will continue to rumble as the number of new infections remains high (the daily average of positive tests is currently 14,778 for the UK as a whole) and a major statistician cautioned that the second wave death toll is at way to get to 20,000 before Christmas.
Data from the England Department of Health suggests that deaths in the second coronavirus wave peaked in the third week of November and may now be declining again.
On the back of today’s ONS data, Cambridge University Statistics Professor David Spiegelhalter noted that Covid-19 is killing more than eight times more people than flu and pneumonia.
While there were 280 deaths caused by flu or pneumonia in the week through Nov. 13, there were 2,361 caused by Covid-19, according to the ONS report. Deaths ‘related to’ Covid-19 were 2,697, while those related to flu amounted to 2,605.
He added: ‘Between September 5 and November 20, 12,907 Covid-related deaths were recorded in the UK, and there have been roughly 3,000 since then, which adds up to 16,000 in total in the second wave.
Sadly, the prediction that the second wave would involve tens of thousands of Covid deaths appears to be coming true, and we can expect this second wave total to rise to more than 20,000 by Christmas.
Once again, there were more than 1,000 additional deaths in private homes compared to normal, a 40 percent increase.
“This appears to be a long-term change in the way people are dying in this country and it deserves a lot of attention.”
Although deaths not caused by Covid are still below average, possibly because many people who would have died from other diseases died from the coronavirus, there have still been thousands of excess deaths this year, and these have increased again during the second wave.
In private homes, there were 1,001 more deaths than the average in the week to November 20, along with 999 in hospitals and 180 in nursing homes.
For the year since March, there have been a total of 34,663 excess deaths in private homes and 25,428 in nursing homes, while there have been 7,460 fewer than normal deaths in hospitals during that time.
Deaths in nursing homes, where people are most vulnerable to Covid-19, increased during November, more than doubling in a fortnight between the beginning and the middle of the month, but also began to stabilize.
The data shows that 467 nursing home residents died of the disease in the third week of the month, up from 425 the week before, 280 the week before, and 168 in the last week of October.
Until November, the death toll in nursing homes had remained relatively low during the UK’s second wave, with weekly deaths equal to or less than 150 per week during the eight weeks of September and October.
The numbers pale in comparison to as much as 2,800 a week during the first peak of the epidemic in April.
A total of 2,697 coronavirus deaths were recorded in the week ending November 13, which was 231 more than the previous week and accounted for more than one-fifth (21.5 percent) of the 12,535 deaths from all causes in that week. .
Although the week’s Covid deaths is the highest number since the week ending May 15, the slightest increase suggests that the number will soon peak and begin to fall again.
Figures from the ONS show that the increase in deaths began to slow in late October after rising in the wake of a massive spike in infections in September, when schools and universities returned.
It is known that the increase in positive tests takes about three weeks to translate into deaths.
Deaths rose 53 percent in the week through Oct. 16, the ONS found, then 46 percent the following week, then 41 percent, 40 percent, 27 percent, and most recently in 9 percent.
All but one region of England, eastern England, saw an increase in deaths from Covid-19.
The Northwest had 629, the highest, followed by 481 in Yorkshire and the Humber, 306 in the West Midlands and 289 in the East Midlands.
