Twenty-one coronavirus deaths have been confirmed so far at a Harlow hospital – the highest number at any hospital in the east of England.
The Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow has seen 21 deaths in ten days, NHS England confirmed on Tuesday, March 31.
The hospital’s death toll tops any other hospital in the East of England, an area which covers Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire and has recorded 1,632 cases Covid-19 and 147 deaths.
The hospital’s first death was recorded on March 21. By March 24 ten more people had died.
Lance McCarthy, chief executive of the Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust, said: "Our thoughts and condolences remain with the patients' families and loved ones at this difficult time."
Essex now accounts for 380 of the UK’s 25,150 confirmed cases of the deadly virus which has so far claimed 1,789 lives.
However, experts believe the actual number of cases could be much higher.
While other nations including Germany, South Korea and Australia have already tested hundreds of thousands of their citizens, Britain has been lagging behind.
The number of daily tests in fact fell on Tuesday to 8,240, for a total of 143,186 tests since the end of February, according to government figures.
Professor Matthew Freeman, head of Oxford's Dunn School of Pathology, one of Britain's leading disease research centres, told The Daily Telegraph: "We're clearly not doing as well as we could be doing as a nation when it comes to testing, and therefore people like us feel a bit frustrated.”
Chris Hopson, CEO of NHS Providers, said everyone including the government, central NHS leaders, procurement chain, trusts and their pathology labs are all "working very hard to expand coronavirus testing capacity as fast as possible".
In a series of tweets, he said it is important to understand the constraints, pointing out there is a major global shortage of swabs and chemicals needed to complete tests.
"We understand that if existing NHS pathology labs had unlimited swabs and reagent there is enough test machine capacity to process c100,000 tests a day but reagent and swab shortage is currently limiting this to c13k a day," he wrote.
The coronavirus pandemic has infected more than 800,000 people worldwide and more than 38,000 deaths have been recorded.
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