Coronavirus deaths: Total reaches 47,104 in England and Wales, ONS figures show
There were 732 excess deaths in the week ending 5 June - the lowest number of excess deaths since mid-March.
Tuesday 16 June 2020 13:06, UK
England and Wales are still recording excess deaths as the official number of fatalities linked to coronavirus hits 47,104, official figures show.
There were 732 excess deaths in the week ending 5 June - the lowest number of excess deaths since mid-March, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The total number of excess deaths during the coronavirus pandemic for the two regions is now at 58,579.
And around 64,500 more people than usual have died during the outbreak in the UK as a whole, an expert from the ONS said on Tuesday.
"Across the UK about 52,000 deaths have mentioned COVID-19 with 64,500 'excess' deaths," ONS head of health analysis Nick Stripe tweeted.
Epidemiologists have said that excess mortality - deaths from all causes that exceed the five-year average for the time of year - is the best way of determining the number who have died from a disease outbreak because it is internationally comparable.
Scotland announced a further five deaths from coronavirus on Tuesday, bringing the number of hospital deaths to 2,453.
Analysis by Ed Conway, economics editor
The toll is still rising.
While the number of people dying both of COVID-19 and other causes has dropped significantly from the peak of the epidemic in April, the depressing reality is it's falling far slower than anyone would like. The virus is still having an impact on UK mortality.
The main metric we have for this is the number of people dying of all causes above the historical average - this gives us the best sense of the direct and indirect impact of the epidemic and the lockdown.
And there were 802 of these so-called "excess deaths" in the UK in the week ending 5 June (732 of them in England and Wales).
The good news is that the excess death toll is down sharply, by almost 1,000 a week. It is quite possible it is back down to "normal" levels by next week or the week after. The bad news is that it is still high - around 7% higher than "normal" levels.
So the death toll is still rising. As of the week ending 5 June, the total number of excess deaths since mid-March had risen to over 64,500 across the UK.
Of those deaths, just under 52,000 mentioned COVID-19 in the death certificate.
When you look at the places where people are dying, something else striking emerges.
While care homes were for a long time the epicentre of the COVID-19 crisis, with more excess deaths happening there than in hospitals or indeed domestic settings, something has changed in the past couple of weeks.
As of the latest week, there are more excess deaths happening in domestic settings - in other words at home - than in any other setting.
Indeed there are 41% more people dying at home than would typically be around this time of year. Whether this is down to lockdown, the virus itself, other diseases that aren't being treated because of the medical system being focused on the coronavirus, we simply do not yet know.
This is depressing stuff, and if you compare the UK to other countries around the world it's pretty clear Britain's death toll is among the worst - though one should be careful about such comparisons since the data is not always comparable.
Still, it will take some time before we have a coherent sense of the final death toll, since it is quite possible Britain will have fewer deaths than the historical average in the coming months - in other words, some of the deaths experienced in the past weeks might have happened anyway in the coming months.
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So we should reserve our judgement on the final toll.
We should also remember that behind every one of these statistics is a family that has been devastated by the loss of a loved one.
These are not just data points but personal tragedies. Sadly there are now a horrible number of them.