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 The United Kingdom's official death toll is 91,470 - Europe's worst
figure and the world's fifth worst after the United States, Brazil,
India and Mexico. Deaths rose by a record on Tuesday.
As hospital admissions soared, the British government's chief
scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, said there was enormous
pressure on the National Health Service with doctors and nurses
battling to give people sufficient care.
"It may not look like it when you go for a walk in the park, but
when you go into a hospital, this is very, very bad at the moment
with enormous pressure and in some cases it looks like a war zone in
terms of the things that people are having to deal with," Vallance
told Sky.
"There have been huge numbers of cases, the NHS is under enormous
pressure at the moment," said Vallance, formerly head of research at
GlaxoSmithKline and a professor of medicine at University College
London.
Home Secretary Priti Patel said that the death numbers were
horrendous but that it was not the time to look back at the
government's possible mismanagement of the crisis.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been criticised for reacting too
slowly to the crisis, failing to supply sufficient protective
equipment and for bungling the testing system, although the United
Kingdom has been swift to roll out a vaccine.
COVID-19 CRISIS
The British government reported a record rise in deaths on Tuesday
with 1,610 people dying within 28 days of a positive coronavirus
test. Currently 37,946 people are in hospital with COVID, 3,916 of
them on ventilation.
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There have been calls for a public inquiry from some doctors and
bereaved families into the handling of the crisis, but Johnson has
resisted this.
"Every single death is deeply tragic," Patel told LBC when asked why
the death toll was so large. "There's no one factor as to why we
have such a horrendous and tragic death rate." "I
don't think this is the time to talk about mismanagement," Patel
said when asked by the BBC if the government had mismanaged the
crisis.
Ministers say that while they have not got everything right, they
were making decisions at speed in the worst public health crisis for
a century and that they have learned from mistakes and followed
scientific advice.
Loosening the UK lockdown too soon, though, would be a mistake,
Vallance said.
"The lesson is every time you release it too quickly you get an
upswing and you can see that right across the world," he said.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and Kate Holton, editing by Estelle
Shirbon and Angus MacSwan)
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