Wednesday 1 April 2020

Coronavirus: UK deaths rise to 2,352 amid rush to test medics


A drive-through NHS testing site in Wembley, north London
Image captionA drive-through testing site for NHS staff at an Ikea store in Wembley, north London
A further 563 patients with coronavirus have died in the UK, taking the total number of deaths in hospitals to 2,352. 
The Department of Health said 29,474 people have tested positive for the virus, up 4,324 since Tuesday.
It comes as No 10 confirmed more than 2,000 NHS frontline staff in England have been tested for coronavirus since the outbreak began.
Hundreds have been screened since the weekend in a push to get healthy self-isolating medics back to work.
Cabinet minister Michael Gove said a shortage of chemicals needed for the tests meant the NHS - which employs 1.2m in England - could not screen its staff for the virus.
No 10 said test capacity will increase with an additional network of labs and testing sites. 
The PM's official spokesman said the government was "working with NHS England, Public Health England and others to ensure that happens".
The latest increase in the number of people who have died relates to the 24 hours up to 17:00 BST on Tuesday.
The BBC's head of statistics Robert Cuffe said the latest increases in the number of patients dying with coronavirus balance out with the below-average rises seen on Sunday and Monday.
"On average, over the last week, the number of new deaths has been growing just below a quarter every day - or doubling twice in a week," he said.
"That's slightly slower than earlier in the epidemic but if that keeps up, we'd expect to see in the region of a thousand deaths a day by the weekend.
"The scientific community is still warning that it takes time for the effect of measures like social distancing to feed through into the numbers on death. On average, those who died in the last few days were infected before the lockdown began."

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