The number of patients being admitted to hospital between Dec. 4 and 10 was also up 10% compared with the previous seven days, with 5,925 people being hospitalised…reports Asian Lite News.
UK has at least 250 people in the hospital with the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus, the British Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab said on Tuesday.
Sky news has said that the Deputy Prime Minister had misspoken when he made this statement.
When asked for a comment, a spokesman for the justice ministry told Reuters to call the health ministry and suggested Reuters use different figures. The health ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid said on Monday that 10 people were in hospital with Omicron.
Meanwhile, Britain reported 59,610 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, the highest figure since early January, as it faces what Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called a “tidal wave” on infections from the Omicron variant, official data showed.
The number of new infections is the fifth highest recorded since the outbreak of the pandemic in March last year.
The figures also showed there had been 150 deaths within 28 days of a positive test.
The number of patients being admitted to hospital between Dec. 4 and 10 was also up 10% compared with the previous seven days, with 5,925 people being hospitalised.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid said the variant now accounted for 44% of infections in London and would be the dominant strain in the capital within 48 hours. New Omicron infections are estimated at 200,000 per day, Javid said.
Before the death was announced, Britain said 10 people had been hospitalised with Omicron in various parts of England. Their ages ranged from 18 to 85 years and most had received two vaccination doses.
The UK Health Security Agency said Omicron – first detected in South Africa, Botswana and Hong Kong in late November – can overcome the immunity of those who have had two shots of vaccines such as AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech.
South Africa’s health ministry said it was unable to say with certainty if any of its Covid-19 deaths were caused by Omicron as deaths were not broken down by variant.
The World Health Organization said on Sunday that while preliminary findings from South Africa suggest Omicron may be less severe than the Delta variant – currently dominant worldwide, and all cases reported in the Europe region have been mild or asymptomatic, it remains unclear to what extent Omicron may be inherently less virulent.
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