A huge surge in the reported number of daily coronavirus cases was due to a “technical issue”, the government has said.
Almost 13,000 new cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in the UK in the 24 hours up to 9am Saturday, a jump of nearly 6,000 from the day before.
The official dashboard that records cases said the surge was due to a glitch and includes some additional cases from the period between September 24 and October 1.
It did not specify exactly which days the extra cases were from or how the previous counts were affected.
Cabinet minister Brandon Lewis was asked about a technical issue, telling the Sophy Ridge programme on Sunday morning: “Those numbers have been put in as of yesterday and as you say, has had that impact on the numbers.
“I would say actually this is a testament to how focused the Department of Health, Public Health England, the Test and Trace are around the system.
“We are being transparent about this, we’re publishing the figures daily.”
Lewis insisted the issue was being looked at “to ensure it doesn’t happen again”.
Experts have previously warned that describing the daily figure as a record could be “misleading” as it is not clear how many people were actually infected during the height of the first wave due to a lack of community testing at the time.
Saturday’s figure brings the total number of cases in the UK to 480,017, PA Media reports.
The government also said a further 49 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Saturday. This brings the UK total to 42,317.
Separate figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies show there have now been nearly 57,900 deaths registered in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.
Other figures show there were 2,194 Covid-19 patients in hospital in England as of Saturday, up from 1,622 a week ago, while 307 Covid-19 hospital patients were in ventilation beds, up from 223 a week ago.
A total of 368 patients with confirmed Covid-19 were admitted to hospitals in England on Thursday, compared with 288 a week earlier.