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Seven health workers in the UK have now died after contracting coronavirus, Michael Gove has announced.
On Friday, the NHS confirmed the deaths of Walsall nurse Areema Nasreen and 39-year-old Aimee O’Rourke, who was part of the nursing team in the Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital in Kent.
Gove said their deaths – along with those of 13-year-old Ismail Mohamed Abdulwahab and a 5-year-old with underlying health conditions – demonstrated the need for the public to stay at home.
“Whatever the temptations this weekend, please don’t go outside to visit the lakes, the beaches, the countryside,” the Cabinet minister said during the government’s daily briefing on Covid-19.
“Take pride instead in keeping your own families and communities safe.
“The more we restrict contact, the more we slow the spread of the infection, the more time we have to build capacity in the NHS.”
On Saturday, the death toll in the UK from coronavirus topped 4,000, with 708 deaths recorded between 5pm on Thursday and Friday.
Meanwhile, the department of health revealed that almost 42,000 people had tested positive for the infection.
NHS England national medical director Professor Stephen Powis said the death rate continued to be high and “unfortunately this is likely to continue for a week or two”.
It is “not the time to be complacent”, he said.
During the conference, Gove said the government was working to increase the UK’s capacity to fight the coronavirus pandemic, including the number of ventilators available to hospitals.
He said that a team from University College London – working with Mercedes Benz – had produced a new clinically-approved non-invasive respirator.
“They produced 250 yesterday, they will produce the same number today and tomorrow, rising to 1,000 a day next week,” he said.
“We are also increasing the capacity of the NHS to deploy invasive ventilation, we have been buying invasive ventilators from partners abroad including Germany and Switzerland.”
Meanwhile, an additional 300 ventilators arrived in the UK from China on Saturday.
“The more ventilators – invasive and non-invasive – available to the NHS, the more patients get the care they need, when they need it,” Gove said.
“But the process of design, assembly, testing and manufacture does take time and we need to make sure that these devices are safe and their manufacture scaleable.”