AN analysis of hospital figures shows the fatal impact of coronavirus in our county, with our peak confirmed as being in early April.

At the peak of the pandemic around 10 people a day were dying of the virus in county hospitals, the data reveals.

READ MORE: 6,000 more deaths than in previous years as coronavirus hit West Midlands

READ MORE: 303 bus service from Kidderminster to Worcester is saved from axe

Daily recorded death figures are released by the NHS and they provide a running total for Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust and Worcestershire Health and Care Trust hospitals. Since April 3 this paper has published the new recorded deaths daily. But the deaths are ones newly announced and don’t show when a person in fact died. For example deaths from April or May could have only just been registered.

Looking through the data shows the dates when people died of Covid-19, and reveals the worst six weeks of deaths came between March 23 and May 3. The worst week was between March 30 and April 5, when 52 people died. The second worst was the following week, April 6 to April 12 when 48 died, and the third was the week after that, April 13 to April 19, when 41 died.

Among the worst single days of the county’s pandemic were; April 1, when 12 people lost their lives; April 12 when 11 people died in county hospitals; and when 10 people died on April 10, April 13 and April 28.

Peter Pinfield, chairman of Healthwatch Worcestershire, the group that represent county patients, said the data showed the county’s peak came at a similar time to the rest of the county.

“It is a consequence of not getting ahead of everything,” he said.

“The delay we had impacted on our toll, put pressure on the frontline staff, and resulted in unnecessary deaths that caused a lot of pain and suffering. That is in hindsight. I think we will need a public enquiry on how this was handled, and what went wrong.”

The final week of available data, May 25 to May 31, showed there were 15 deaths, five more than the week before that. It should be stressed the NHS is constantly adding to all weeks as more Covid-19 deaths are registered and in particular figures from recent weeks are likely to change. For that reason Mr Pinfield said he was cautious to read too much into that increase.

“With looking at statistics and figures you do need a longer period to work out what is happening,” he said.

“We are expecting a second surge, but in Worcestershire this time we have the facilities, we have got the staff, we have got the PPE. The briefing Healthwatch gets is they are planning for another surge. Hopefully that might be wrong, but we have the facilities so that we don’t have the same depth of tragedies that we had in April.”