No coronavirus deaths reported at Oxfordshire hospitals for 18 days

It puts the county among the best in England, with only 20 per cent of hospital trusts going more than seven days without reporting a fatality from Covid-19.

Oxford University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (OUH), which runs both the John Radcliffe and Banbury's Horton General, has not announced any new deaths since May 22.

NHS England figures show 177 people had died in hospital at the trust as of 5pm on Monday.

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There has been a steady decrease in deaths in recent days, though a further 286 virus fatalities were reported yesterday across the UK.

Part of Oxfordshire's success could be down to the way the outbreak has presented in the county.

Hospital bosses previously predicted a 'lower but longer' peak for the virus in Oxfordshire.

Catherine Mountford, director of governance for Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group, said yesterday, at the first public meeting of the health provider since the pandemic took hold, that the response from NHS services across the county had been 'phenomenal' and staff had acted 'amazingly fast' adding: "This was all done in the context of expecting a very large peak over early April.

"The peak in the amount of disease services we needed was not as high and so the introduction of lockdown had a big impact on a lower, flatter, longer peak."

Diane Hedges, deputy chief executive of the CCG, said these were 'extraordinary times' but added: "In the Covid crisis we've always had sufficient ventilators and ITU bed capacity to meet the demand that's presented and also had spare capacity. That's been tracked really closely through the process to ensure we've had sufficient capacity."

As of Monday analysis by Oxford University researchers showed 78 hospital trusts in England – 59.5 per cent– had reported no deaths in the last 48 hours.

Professor Jason Oke and Professor Carl Heneghan of The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine also revealed no deaths had been reported in the last seven days at 17 – 13 per cent – of trusts like OUH which have Type 1 A&E departments that are a consultant-led 24-hour service.

In total 28 – 21.4 per cent – of all trusts recorded no deaths have occurred in the last seven days.

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Oxford Health, which runs community hospitals in the county as well as services beyond Oxfordshire, has reported 22 deaths, with the most recent on May 21.

A note with the data stated the reporting of deaths by NHS England is much lower than the figures reported by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The latest ONS data shows that in Oxford, 70 deaths involving Covid-19 had been provisionally registered up to June 6.

The figures, based on where Covid-19 is mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, include all deaths that occurred up to May 29 but were registered up to eight days later.

Of those, 37 occurred outside hospital – including 26 in care homes and nine at private homes. A further two deaths occurred in hospices, other community establishments or elsewhere.

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Despite the positive news from the county's hospitals there are indications the region is not out of danger, with work by the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit at Cambridge University indicating the R rate is rising in the region.

In the south east it is now at 0.97, putting the region as the third highest in England, behind the south west and north west.

The reproduction (R) rate is the number of people each infected person, on average, will pass the virus onto.

For example if the R is two, then 10 people would infect 20 others, but if R is 0.5, those 10 people would infect only five.

The important threshold is an R of one, with anything lower indicating that an outbreak is in decline, and an increase raising concerns about a corresponding rise in infections.