The United Kingdom has overtaken Italy to report the highest official death toll from coronavirus disease Covid-19 in Europe, figures released on Tuesday showed.
Weekly figures from Britain’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) added more than 7,000 deaths in England and Wales in the week to April 24, raising the total for the United Kingdom to 32,313. Italy said on Tuesday that it has recorded 29,316 virus fatalities to date.
Only the United States, with a population nearly five times greater, has suffered more confirmed fatalities from the virus than Britain, according to the data so far. Nearly 69,000 have died in the pandemic there.
Italy and Spain, the next worst-hit European countries, have smaller populations than Britain, further complicating comparisons.
“Putting a graph out with the United States at the top and UK second is not helpful, but once you start to break it down by looking at the population we should be seriously asking questions about what’s different,” Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, told news agency Reuters.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab urged against trying to make reliable international comparisons.
“There are different ways of counting deaths… we now publish data that includes all deaths in all settings and not all countries do that,” he said at the daily Downing Street press conference.
“Can you reliably know that all countries are measuring in the same way? And it also depends on how good, frankly, countries are in gathering their statistics.”
Tuesday’s updated statistics means Britain has probably had the highest official death numbers in Europe for days.
But the weekly ONS data also shows that the peak in Covid-19 deaths has likely passed, although the week to April 24 was still the second-deadliest since comparable records began being kept in 1993.
Britain, in its seventh week of an economically crippling lockdown, is trying to implement a new contact tracing strategy so it can ease the measures.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to set out his plan to lift the stringent social distancing regime next Sunday, according to media reports.
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