Expert predicts 40,000 deaths in UK due to Covid-19

A British health professor told lawmakers on Friday that the UK government had been too slow to act to protect Britons from the Covid-19 outbreak and predicted that the death toll from the pandemic could reach 40,000.

Anthony Costello, professor of International Child Health and Director of the UCL Institute for Global Health, told the Health and Social Care Committee that the government’s error could result in the UK suffering the highest death rate overall in Europe.

Over 14,576 patients diagnosed with the illness had died in hospital already and revisions to government figures indicated that the true number might be much larger.

Costello also argued that the United Kingdom needed to put in place wide scale testing and the right systems to deal with the crisis.

In all, 341,551 people had been tested thus far, of whom 108,692 had tested positive, government data showed.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said mass community testing was part of the British strategy. He also said that authorities were still trying to find an antibody test that was efficient enough.