UK coronavirus toll nears Italy’s, PM says nation ‘past the peak’

The United Kingdom could well become the European nation with the highest death toll from the coronavirus, according to the latest government figures.

Daily statistics released on Thursday evening reported a further 674 people had died in the UK after contracting the virus, giving a total, according to Downing Street, of 26,711.

Only Italy has a higher toll in Europe, with 27,967 deaths officially attributed to the coronavirus. Daily death tolls in Italy are now declining, with 285 announced on Thursday and 323 the day before, while new cases are also falling fast.

But the UK is past the peak, or at least the first peak, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told reporters on Thursday, as he warned against lifting lockdown measures too quickly.

“We’ve come under what could have been a vast peak, as though we’ve been going through some huge Alpine tunnel – and we can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us,” the prime minister said at his first briefing since being taken ill with the virus.

“And so it is vital that we do not now lose control and run slap into a second and even bigger mountain.” 

‘Avoided catastrophe’

Johnson’s administration has been fiercely criticised for its handling of the pandemic, with accusations ranging from a failure to quickly institute a test-and-trace programme, to not introducing lockdown restrictions early enough and failing to provide front-line healthcare workers with adequate personal protective equipment.

But the prime minister, returning to the podium a day after his partner gave birth, compared the nation’s death toll with the much larger estimates envisaged when the scale of the crisis first began to emerge.

“It’s thanks to that massive collective effort to shield the [National Health Service] that we avoided an uncontrollable and catastrophic epidemic, where the reasonable worst-case scenario was 500,000 deaths,” he said.

He added that comparisons with other countries was “a fruitless exercise”, but his comments sparked fury online.

Please don't shout, Helen. I listened to every word and I'm objecting to the stone deaf insensitivity of characterising a shattering death toll, with all the grief & pain that entails, as somehow "not" a tragedy because it's below 500k deaths.

— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) April 30, 2020

Concrete measures to ease the lockdown that has devastated the economy are unlikely to be unveiled soon, but the first steps of a strategy will be announced next week, said Johnson.

And while the government’s target of 100,000 tests per day by the end of the month looks a lot more feasible than it did when it was announced, with more than 80,000 tests carried out on Wednesday, many Britons will be relieved to have been given some degree of clarity as to the future.

Johnson said next week would see “a comprehensive plan … a road map” explaining the conditions needed for schools to begin reopening and businesses to resume trading.

It’ll be “a menu of options”, he said. “The dates and times of each individual measure will be very much driven by where we are in the epidemic, and what the data is saying – and we’re getting a lot more data every day.”

The next step in Britain’s fight against the pandemic will be all about keeping the “R” number – that is, the number of people that one infected person infects – as low as possible, officials said on Thursday.

Keeping the R down is going to be absolutely vital to our recovery, and we can only do it by our collective discipline and working together. pic.twitter.com/DIRkoc4pp3

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) April 30, 2020