CORONAVIRUS has claimed its youngest victim in the UK, after an otherwise healthy 13-year-old boy with no underlying health conditions passed away on Monday morning.
Reports suggest Ismail Mohamed Abdulwahab, from Brixton, south London, died without any family members close by due to the highly infectious nature of Covid-19.
The teenager passed at King’s College Hospital yesterday morning after being put into an induced coma.
In a statement, the Mohamed family said: “Ismail started showing symptoms and had difficulties breathing, and was admitted to King’s College Hospital.
“He was put on a ventilator and then put into an induced coma, but sadly died yesterday morning. To our knowledge he had no underlying health conditions. We are beyond devastated.”
Officials revealed that another teenager, a 19 year-old, who had no underlying health conditions, was also among those to have died on Monday after contracting the disease.
The number of people killed by Covid-19 across the UK hit a record high of 381, bringing the UK death toll to 1789.
That’s the biggest daily rise in fatalities so far.
The new figures include 367 more deaths in England, taking its total to 1651. On Tuesday, 13 more deaths were also reported in Scotland, seven more in Wales, and six more in Northern Ireland.
Officials said that all but 28 patients had underlying health conditions.
Addressing the daily Downing Street press conference, Dr Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medical officer said: “Although what we know about this disease is that, in general, younger people are not having significant severe illness, it is the case, very sadly ... that young people can still be affected.”
She said younger people “tend not to think of death” and so it is “quite easy perhaps to not think of yourself as part of the risk, or part of the affected group”.
She added: “They are really sad reminders that it doesn’t matter what age you are, you should be staying at home and observing all the social distancing measures we have highlighted.”
Meanwhile, Michael Gove (pictured) said a shortage of chemicals was hampering British efforts to ramp up testing for coronavirus.
He was asked during the daily briefing why Germany was able to carry out more than seven times the number of tests as the UK.
Gove admitted, for the first time, the the UK needed to go “further, faster”.
“We are increasing the number of tests. One of the constraints on our capacity to increase testing overall is supply of the specific reagents, the specific chemicals, that are needed in order to make sure that tests are reliable,” he said.
“The Prime Minister and the Health Secretary are working with companies worldwide to ensure that we get the material we need to increase tests of all kinds.”
Gove also revealed that thousands of new ventilators should be coming off production lines and heading to hospitals at the start of next week.
It’s thought the machines are the first of up to 15,000 ordered from Ventilator Challenge UK, a consortium including Airbus and Rolls-Royce.
In total, orders have been placed for 61,000 ventilators to be shared across the UK.
He said: “We have just over 8000 ventilators deployed in NHS hospitals now. This number has increased since the epidemic began, thanks to the hard work of NHS professionals, but we need more.
“That’s why we are buying more ventilators from abroad, including from EU nations. It’s also why we are developing new sources of supply at home.
“I can announce that this weekend, the first of thousands of new ventilator devices will roll off the production line and be delivered to the NHS next week.”
Though health is devolved, the Scottish Government is part of a joint procurement effort for more ventilators.
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