UK: Coronavirus deaths top 18,700

By Karim El-Bar

LONDON (AA) – British health authorities announced on Thursday that the UK-wide death toll from coronavirus rose 616 in the last 24 hours.

The Department of Health reported: “425,821 people have been tested of which 138,078 tested positive.

“As of 5pm on 22 April, of those hospitalised in the UK who tested positive for coronavirus, 18,738 have sadly died.”

At a press briefing at Downing Street earlier in the day, the prime minister’s spokesman said that 50 mobile laboratories are being planned by the end of the month to boost testing.

There is a “great deal more to do” on testing, he said. The government has said it plans to test up to 100,000 people a day by the end of the month, though it looks set to miss that target.

The government is also recruiting 300,000 people to test for coronavirus over the course of the year, to see how many people in the total population have been infected.

The spokesman confirmed that yesterday Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke with Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who is deputizing for Johnson as he recovers from coronavirus.

The spokesman also rejected claims the government is not treating the public like adults by refusing to explain how the lifting of the lockdown may take place.

George Osborne, former chancellor of the Exchequer and current editor of London-circulating Evening Standard, tweeted: “An open discussion about the hard tradeoffs we face living with the virus for the foreseeable future. UK Ministers refusing to discuss the lockdown in public while briefing ideas to ease it in private can’t last. Time to treat the public like adults.”

Since the virus emerged in China last December, it has spread to at least 185 countries and regions.

There are more than 2.6 million confirmed infections globally with nearly 186,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. More than 722,000 have recovered.