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Daily Record
Daily Record
National
Edel Kenealy

Covid-19 death toll tops 400 in Renfrewshire

More than 400 people in Renfrewshire have now died after contracting Covid-19 as the region records one of its deadliest months of the pandemic so far.

A total of 65 people lost their lives to the virus in January - the highest monthly total since last April.

Of those, 13 took place in a care home.

It means 406 Covid-19 fatalities have now been recorded in the local authority area since the start of pandemic in March.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said this week that while the number of cases continues to fall in Renfrewshire and across Scotland, tragedies were still occurring for families every day.

She said: “As we start to see case numbers and numbers of hospitalised and patients in intensive care decline, obviously it takes longer for the numbers of people dying to start to decline as well and we should therefore remember that even though we might be starting to see some positive signs in the statistics, there are too many families across the country still losing loved ones.

“I again want to send my condolences and my thoughts to everybody who is grieving, particularly those recently bereaved, but to everybody who has lost a loved one in the course of the pandemic.”

Ms Sturgeon spoke about the death toll as she revealed the R number reflecting the rate of infection across the country remains under one.

It currently stands at between 0.7 and 0.9.

And on Friday, for the second day in a row, the test positivity rate was below five per cent, which is the Word Health Organisation’s definition of a pandemic under control.

Across Renfrewshire the number of new covid infections has more than halved since the start of the year.

In the week to February 3, there were 287 new cases recorded, down 55 per cent, from 650 in the first week of January.

It means the council area now has an infection rate of 172.5 per 100,000, making it the eighth worst affected region in Scotland.

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