The number of people who have died with the covid-19 coronavirus has risen to 51 at the hospital trust that serves Brighton and Hove.
Some of those may not have died as a result of the coronavirus but had tested positive for the virus.
Of those, 38 have died since the start of the month in hospitals run by the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust. Nine died at the weekend and eight the previous weekend.
The trust, known as BSUH, runs the Royal Sussex County Hospital and the Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital, in Brighton, and the Princess Royal Hospital, in Haywards Heath.
The same leadership team runs one of the neighbouring trusts, Western Sussex Hospitals, which includes Worthing General Hospital.
Western has recorded 42 deaths of people with the coronavirus. Of those, 31 have died since the start of the month.
The Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust, which is based at Brighton General Hospital, in Elm Grove, has so far recorded six deaths in hospital of people with the virus.
The trust runs a number of hospitals around Sussex although the Brighton General itself is no longer used as a hospital.
Another neighbouring NHS trust, East Sussex Healthcare, which runs Eastbourne General Hospital, has recorded 37 deaths – 25 of them since the start of the month.
Nationally, the death of 778 more hospital patients who had coronavirus was announced yesterday (Tuesday 14 April), taking the UK total to 12,107.
Mortality figures published by the Office for National Statistics yesterday indicated that the number of hospital deaths of patients with the coronavirus gave only part of the picture.
The number of deaths registered of people with coronavirus was at least 50 per cent higher each day in the 30 days to Friday 3 April.
On some days it was two and a half times as high as the figure for hospital deaths alone.
Again, some of the deaths may have been the result of other conditions but the presence of coronavirus was recorded and may have been a contributory cause.
The deaths occurred in nursing homes and care homes, hospices, in people’s own homes or elsewhere other than in a hospital.
The number of people tested and found to have the virus rose by 5,252 to 93,873. The number of tests carried out went up by 14,982 to 382,650, although the figure includes some patients who were tested more than once.
In Brighton and Hove, 218 people have tested positive for the coronavirus. The figure for West Sussex was 459 and for East Sussex it was 359, making 1,036 across Sussex as a whole.
