The UK has now entered its ‘worst-case scenario’

The UK has entered its worst-case scenario as the coronavirus death toll is now rising beyond the highest figure predicted by government scientists.

As recently as April 5, one of Downing Street’s lead scientific advisors said deaths were likely to rise to between 7,000 and around 20,000.

But the figure today rose to 20,287 after another 781 people were announced to have died in UK hospitals after contracting the virus.

The real toll will be even higher once deaths in care homes and the community are accounted for.

The prediction by Professor Neil Ferguson, who leads a team of outbreak modelling experts whose work has influenced the UK’s strategy, had been tightened to account for the effects of the lockdown.

His team’s research previously suggested that some 250,000 people would die if the government tried to mitigate the outbreak without a full lockdown.

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On March 28, national medical director Stephen Powis said ‘we will have done very well’ to keep the number of deaths below 20,000.

The benchmark was also described as a ‘good outcome’ although ‘still horrible’ by the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, in the run-up to the lockdown.

Thousands more people are believed to have died in non-hospital locations, although data is difficult to track.

The number of coronavirus-related deaths in care homes was estimated by Care England to have reached 7,500 a week ago.

Analysis by the Financial Times suggested there had in fact been 41,102 deaths by Tuesday this week.

It used Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures on how many Britons are dying in total and other sources to extrapolate the number of deaths to reflect what is happening in the wider community.

A report by the University of Washingon’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) using different modelling suggested the UK will have 66,000 deaths from Covid-19 within four months – and triple that of Italy and Spain.

Scientists agree that all coronavirus prediction models suffer from a lack of accurate data on case numbers and fatality rates. This is because many people show mild or no symptoms and are often not identified as confirmed cases.

The UK currently has the fifth-highest official death toll in the world, after the US, Italy, Spain and France.

It appears to be rising more slowly, but experts believe the death rate will only start to fall quickly in around two weeks’ time.

Italy, whose outbreak is said to be around two weeks ahead of the UK’s, is still consistently reporting more than 400 deaths a day.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps used Friday’s Downing Street press conference to hammer home the need to keep staying at home.

Mr Shapps said: ‘The country has done incredibly well in adhering to social distancing and there is a danger as we go into yet another warm sunny weekend that people think that perhaps these graphs are showing that the peak is over.

‘It isn’t over, we’re riding perhaps, we hope, a downward trend but it is by no means, no means established yet.’

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