Wherever you turn in 2020, it’s hard to escape Coronavirus. This is a global pandemic on a scale not seen since the Spanish Flu of the 1910s; it’s like nothing most of us have ever experienced. Earlier this year, we published another blog on the subject:
How Many People Have Died from Coronavirus? But today we’re going to look at another subject, that being is Coronavirus the number one cause of death in the United Kingdom?
In September you may have seen the headlines which declared that August 2020 was the least deadly month in the UK since 2000, with a rate of death per 100,000 of 746.
Believe it or not, in August 2020 Coronavirus was only the 24th most common cause of death in the United Kingdom. Topping the list was Alzheimer’s, with heart disease and lung cancer in 2nd and 3rd. Covid-19 accounted for only 1.4% of all deaths in the month – equating to 482 out of 34,000.
In April 2020, Coronavirus was the cause of a third of UK deaths, and 3 months later in June was still the third most common cause of death in the country. However over the summer – and despite relaxed restrictions – both cases and deaths drastically decreased, with just 2 people dying due to the pandemic in the UK on August 21st.
Throughout September and October 2020, Coronavirus appears to be entering a ‘second wave’, with more confirmed cases than at any point – although a lot of this could be down to the much-increased testing since the peak of the virus in Spring 2020 – and with deaths beginning to rise again rapidly.
During the month of October, the UK Government has begun to enact ‘local lockdowns’, with areas split into tiers based on the severity of the case numbers. Areas such as Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Nottingham currently reside in Tier 3, the highest level of alert.
On 28th October, 310 people in the UK died within 28 days of receiving a positive Coronavirus test, with 24,701 new cases also being confirmed. On this day, both France and Germany announced they were going to be enforcing new national lockdowns, with some expecting the UK to follow suit in due course.
So to answer the question I set out at the start of this blog, is Coronavirus the number one cause of death in the UK? Currently it isn’t, but this doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be once again if deaths continue to rise as we enter the winter months. Hopefully, that won’t be the case.
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