Coronavirus: France’s COVID-19 death toll passes 10,000 mark

France’s COVID-19 death toll jumped by more than 1,400 and passed the 10,000 mark on Tuesday.

France has become the fourth country to register more than 10,000 deaths due to coronavirus, while New York reported 731 new fatalities, the highest overnight jump since the beginning of the outbreak.

French authorities said that 597 people have died in hospital in one day, bringing the total of deaths in hospital to 7,091, while 3,237 have died in nursing home, with 820 new deaths in the last 24 hours.

Edouard Philippe warned that restrictions imposed on French citizens to battle the spread of the potentially fatal disease would continue.

Philippe told the Assemblée nationale that lockdown measures brought in almost one month ago would last for as long as necessary.

“It’s extremely premature to start talking about when people can start going out,” Philippe said. “It’s time to remain inside and that’s how it will stay.”

The French government targeted 15 April as the date when measures could be eased.

But the prospect appeared unlikely on Tuesday after top health official Jerome Salomon revealed that Monday had brought another 607 deaths to take the total past 10,000 since the beginning of March.

Just over 7,000 people had died from the virus in French hospitals along with 3,237 in old age homes throughout the country.

Salomon, the director general of health, said of the 30,000 people receiving treatment for the coronavirus, 7,000 patients were receiving treatment in intensive care units.

Not Peaked yet

“We’re not yet at the peak of this since every evening there are a few more people being taken to hospital and a few more people going into intensive care.”

Salomon added: “We’re witnessing levels that we’ve never seen before. It’s going up even if it is at a slow rate.”

Paris bans daytime jogging

Earlier on Tuesday, Paris officials said they would ban lone daytime jogging as people continue to flout anti-coronavirus lockdown rules.

“Every excursion avoided aids the fight against the epidemic,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and police chief Didier Lallement said in a statement announcing the partial jogging ban.

The country started reporting deaths in nursing homes at the beginning of April, so the 820 new deaths announced on Tuesday are in part due to this delay.

UK’s ‘coronavirus dashboard’ may be under-reporting deaths significantly

The UK’s daily death toll updates for Covid-19 could be under-reporting the true number by a significant margin, according to government numbers published Tuesday.

In its daily tally of deaths, UK government counts only people who tested positive and then died of the virus in hospital. But that doesn’t match the number of UK death certificates that list COVID-19 as a factor.

On Tuesday, figures released by the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS), showed that the 1,568 people had Covid-19 listed on their death certificates between March 5, when the first death was reported, and March 27.

In contrast, death tolls released by Public Health England over the same period show only 926 confirmed deaths due to the virus in England.
There are several factors for the difference. The two tallies are counting different things — suspected deaths versus confirmed cases that died in the hospital.

There may also be a lag in reporting, as ONS have more time to record the deaths.

Government spokesperson cautioned on Tuesday that the ONS numbers can’t be used to draw trends about final death tolls from the disease. “You can’t project one onto the other in a statistically safe way,” they said.

But “it’s important to have both numbers,” said UK chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance on Tuesday. “The ONS data, which are important, look at overall deaths on death certificates where coronavirus is mentioned, so that they are not confirmed deaths necessarily,” he explained.

The UK is using the “international reporting standard for deaths,” he added, which he described as “hospitalized deaths confirmed.”
The UK is hardly the only country with data discrepancies and fears of undercounting deaths.

China’s official data on coronavirus-related death and infection rate has drawn scrutiny from outside. And some of the hardest-hit European countries, like France, Italy, and Spain, count more than just hospital deaths in their daily statistics, but could nevertheless be under-reporting for other reasons.

Globally, the number of people diagnosed with the virus now exceeds 1.3 million. More than 74,500 people have died while nearly 285,000 have recovered, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

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