We needed more tests, officials admit, as UK death toll passes Italy

Ministers and public health officials have defended the UK’s response to the coronavirus crisis as the death toll surpassed Italy to become the worst-hit country in Europe.

Officials admitted that a policy of community testing and contact tracing was abandoned in March because of a lack of capacity to test for coronavirus as the outbreak spread out of control before the imposition of a lockdown.

But they insisted that the correct steps were taken to contain the virus, and said a second peak in infections could be avoided through use of testing now that capacity had increased. A total of 32,375 Covid-19 deaths have now been officially registered across the UK up to 2 May, surpassing the official total of 29,079 as of 4 May. The total includes equivalent figures for Scotland of 2,272 deaths up to 26 April.

“I don’t think you can make the international comparisons you’re suggesting at this stage, at least I don’t think you can make them reliably,” Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said at the daily Downing Street press briefing on coronavirus.

A man walks past a large billboard raising awareness to the measures taken by the Italian government to fight against the spread of Covid-19. The UK has officialy passed Italy to now have Europe's highest death toll from coronavirus. Picture: Carlo Hermann/AFP via Getty Images

Latest figures for England and Wales confirmed that deaths in care homes continue to rise even as the daily death toll falls, with an increase of 8.1 per cent in the latest week-long period. Deaths at home also increased by 5.8 per cent.

At the same press conference, Angela Maclean, chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, said the UK still had to “get to grips” with the outbreak in care homes.

Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said the figures showed that “the dire situation in our social care sector is a crisis within a crisis”.

She added: “Any talk of being ‘past the peak’ of this virus is meaningless given these figures. We need urgent action to get PPE to staff the frontline and tests for care workers.”

Experts warned that cross-country comparisons are “difficult” and said the final national death tolls would not be confirmed for some time.

Authorities across Europe are taking different approaches to recording deaths, with figures recorded differently between the nations of the UK.

But the grim milestone will add to criticism of the speed and effectiveness of the UK government’s response.

Italy went into lockdown on 9 March when premier Giuseppe Conte extended restrictions from the north to the entire country in an attempt to stop the spread of Covid-19, after the country’s death toll climbed to 463.

Boris Johnson placed the UK in lockdown two weeks later on 23 March, after the number of people who died in British hospitals after testing positive for the virus stood at 335.

Dr Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer for England, told MPs after the ONS figures were released: “It is extremely difficult to compare between countries. We need to not just look at the numbers clearly, but at the rates. The obvious one is age and standardised death rates per million population.

“Those are not the numbers that are routinely reported, so it is really difficult to do direct comparisons.”

After contact tracing was abandoned on 12 March, Dr Harries said it was “not an appropriate mechanism as we go forward”.

But yesterday she told MPs that if more tests had been available, the UK would have taken a “different approach”.

Also giving evidence to MPs, the chief scientific adviser for England Sir Patrick Vallance said it “would have been beneficial” to have had greater testing capacity earlier in the outbreak. “In the early phases, I think if we’d managed to ramp testing capacity quicker it would have been beneficial,” he said. “For all sorts of reasons that didn’t happen.”

Ms McLean said yesterday that South Korea, which has kept coronavirus deaths to 254 through rigorous testing, contact tracing and isolation of cases, “is really the place in the world that we can look to and say this works”.