Death toll from COVID-19 surpasses 200,000 in Britain

London: More than 200,000 COVID-19 deaths have been recorded across Britain, showed the latest data released on Wednesday from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The grim milestone has been reached in late June but was not revealed until Wednesday due to a delay in registration. Up to the start of July, a total of 200,247 COVID-19 deaths have occurred, the ONS said. The figures include deaths due to COVID-19 as well as those involving the virus. In the week ending July 1, 2022, 11,828 deaths were registered in Britain, 12.1 per cent above the five-year average (1,278 excess deaths), said the ONS.

By early January 2021, more than 100,000 COVID-19 deaths had been registered nationwide. It has taken more than a year and a half for the death toll to double, with vaccination uptake, a better understanding of how to treat the virus, and social distancing measures all contributing to fewer deaths, said British newspaper The Guardian.

According to figures from Our World In Data, as of July 12, Britain has one of the highest COVID-19 death tolls in Europe, with a death rate of about 2,689 per million people, compared with a rate of 2,295 deaths per million people for Spain, 2,230 for France and 1,704 for Germany.

The country's excess mortality rate is also higher than other European averages which stand at 2,070 per million people, more than twice that of Germany's which stands at 1,110.

With testing no longer free, data on cases is provided mainly through the ONS weekly infection survey, which showed in the latest release the percentage of people testing positive for coronavirus continued to increase across Britain, likely caused by increases in infections compatible with Omicron variants BA.4 and BA.5.

In late June, COVID-19 infection levels in Britain have risen by more than 30 per cent in a week, with an estimated 2.3 million infected with the disease.

In a recent interview with Xinhua, Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist and a professor of molecular oncology at the University of Warwick, said that levels of infection with the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 in Britain are probably going to peak very soon.

"At the moment, given the levels of infection in the UK, it's a bit of a wake-up call that we're not, as some would have us believe, in the post-pandemic phase of COVID. We're currently seeing an increase in hospitalizations," said Young.