Covid: Sheffield death toll revealed as Government slammed for decisions that 'cost thousands of lives'

The report, from MPs on the Science and Technology Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee, said the UK’s preparation for a pandemic was far too focused on flu, while ministers waited too long to push through lockdown measures in early 2020.

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And it found that serious errors in the Government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has cost thousands of lives.

How many people have died of Covid in Sheffield?

But how many people within the Sheffield area have died from Covid-19 only, with no other underlying health conditions, since the beginning of the pandemic?

In total, so far, 1,374 people in Sheffield who had no underlying health conditions died within 28 days of contracting Covid-19, according to the Office of National Statistics.

This is based on the number of deaths that occurred up to October 1 2021 (Week 39 2021) but were registered up to October 9 2021. Occurrences will rise as ONS receives more death registrations so data by week of occurrence are updated each week.

Of these, 921 died in 2020, while 453 have died so far in 2021. In 2021, greater numbers of deaths took place in the months that year before the population was widely vaccinated.

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The Office of National Statistics has broken down the locations of the deaths of people with Covid-19.

Since the beginning of the pandemic in Sheffield, 397 people have died in care homes and 65 have died at home.

The highest number of deaths with Covid-19 have occurred in hospital, where 907 people have died in Sheffield.

And there were also six deaths in ‘other communal establishments’ and three deaths with Covid-19 were classed as having occurred ‘elsewhere’.

In the wide-ranging study into the national Government’s response to the pandemic, stretching to 151 pages, MPs criticised the fact community testing was abandoned in March 2020 as a “seminal error”, said NHS test and trace was too slow and failed to have a big impact. It added that thousands of people died in care homes partly due to a policy of discharging people from hospital without testing.

At the beginning of the pandemic, when Covid-19 emerged in China, MPs said the UK policy was to mistakenly take a “gradual and incremental approach” to interventions such as social distancing, isolation and lockdowns.

They said this was “a deliberate policy” proposed by scientists and adopted by UK governments, which has now been shown to be “wrong” and led to a higher death toll.