England's health secretary Matt Hancock confirmed on Saturday that 19 NHS workers have died after contracting coronavirus.
Mr Hancock told BBC Breakfast on Saturday: “My heart goes out to their families, these are people who have put themselves on the front line.
“The work is going on to establish whether they caught coronavirus in the line of duty while at work or whether, like so many other people, caught it in the rest of their lives. It is obviously quite difficult to work that out.
“What matters is we pay tribute to their service.”
He added: “I’m particularly struck at the high proportion of people from minority ethnic backgrounds and people who have come to this country to work in the NHS who have died of coranavirus.
“I find it really upsetting actually and it is a testament to the fact that people who have come from all over the world have come and given their lives in service to the NHS and paid for that with their lives.
“I think we should recognise their enormous contribution.”
It was not made clear whether or not the staff Mr Hancock was referring to worked for the NHS in England only or whether the fatalities also included other parts of the UK. We are awaiting clarification from the UK Department of Health and Social Care on this after a Welsh Government spokesman told us they had not collated data in this way yet and were unable to confirm whether the cases included instances in Wales or not.
Despite repeated requests over the course of the weekend the UK Department of Health and Social Care has not provided us with an update on this. When questioned directly about the figures in the Government's daily press briefing on Sunday Mr Hancock said: "This is a really important question. I don't have an update on the figure of 19 NHS staff that have died that I gave yesterday but I can tell you we are looking into each circumstance to understand as much as possible how they caught the virus, whether at work or outside work, and the clinical setting they were working in and therefore protecting our healthcare workers as much as possible."
Earlier this week tributes were paid to cardio-thoracic surgeon Jitendra Rathod, from the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, who died after testing positive for Covid-19.
In a separate interview Mr Hancock said it was still too early to determine whether the peak of coronavirus infections in the UK had been reached.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday: “The good news is we have seen the number of hospital admissions starting – starting, I stress – to flatten out.
“You can see (from the Government’s charts) that instead of going up exponentially, as they would have done if we had not taken the measures, that they are starting to come down and flatten.
“We haven’t seen that enough to have confidence to make changes.
“The answer to your question, about have we reached the peak, is nobody knows.”
Asked about the chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance saying the UK was two weeks away from the peak, Mr Hancock added: “Our judgement is that we are not there yet and that we haven’t seen a flattening enough to be able to say that we have reached the peak.”
