More than 4,500 people died with Covid-19 over the first year of the pandemic in the Liverpool City Region.
Although the city region’s weekly Covid death toll has now reached its lowest point since September, figures released by the Office for National Statistics on Tuesday showed a total of 4,506 people have died since the beginning of the pandemic.
Tuesday’s figures are the first to cover a full year of the pandemic since the first deaths 12 months ago and show one in every five deaths over the past year has been caused by Covid-19.
The death toll amounts to one in every 350 people in the city region, while parts of Merseyside have seen a death toll closer to one in every 300 people.
While Liverpool itself has recorded the most deaths in total, Sefton is the borough with the highest Covid mortality rate with one death for every 313 people.
However, the figures also show a rapid decrease in the weekly death toll, with just 38 deaths recorded for the week up to March 12.
This was the sixth week in a row that the city region’s weekly death toll declined, and half the number of deaths seen just two weeks earlier.
The figures released by the ONS include all deaths where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate. This means Covid was either the primary cause of death or a contributing factor.
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While several boroughs saw a fall in weekly Covid deaths, Sefton and Wirral saw the same number of deaths as the previous week. Sefton has recorded 12 Covid deaths a week for three weeks running.
Halton saw a small increase in the number of weekly deaths from two to three.
The number of Covid deaths during the week up to March 12 is given below for each borough, along with the total death toll for the pandemic in brackets.
Halton - 3 (295)
Knowsley - 2 (426)
Liverpool - 8 (1,395)
St Helens - 6 (531)
Sefton - 12 (882)
Wirral - 7 (977)
As the virus continues to recede across the city region and more people are given the vaccine, the weekly death toll should keep falling.
