Boris Johnson has said he is “deeply sorry” after the number of people in the UK to have died from coronavirus passed 100,000.

The Prime Minister offered his condolences to the loved ones of those who died, but insisted his Government had done “everything we could” to tackle the pandemic. 

Some 100,162 people have now died within 28 days of a Covid-19 test - that’s roughly 1 in 660 British people. 

That means Britain is the fifth nation in the world to reach six figures, after the United States, Brazil, India and Mexico. 

READ MORE: Boris Johnson says he has ‘total confidence’ in the UK’s supply of vaccines

According to figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) yesterday, which looks at the number of people who have coronavirus mentioned on their death certificates, the UK passed that grim threshold on 7 January.

Last March, Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK Government’s chief scientific adviser, told MPs that if the final tally of deaths in Britain was 20,000 or below it would be “a good outcome”.

During the regular Downing Street coronavirus briefing, the Prime Minister said it was “hard to compute the sorrow contained in that grim statistic: the years of life lost, the family gatherings not attended and for so many relatives the missed chance to even say goodbye”.

He was asked a number of times by journalists why the UK’s death toll was so high, and if there was anything he could have done differently.

The National:

Johnson said: “I think on this day I should just really repeat that I am deeply sorry for every life that has been lost and of course as I was Prime Minister I take full responsibility for everything that the Government has done.

“What I can tell you is that we truly did everything we could, and continue to do everything that we can, to minimise loss of life and to minimise suffering in what has been a very, very difficult stage, and a very, very difficult crisis for our country, and we will continue to do that, just as every government that is affected by this crisis around the world is continuing to do the same.”

England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty warned that there would be “a lot more deaths over the next few weeks before the effects of the vaccines begin to be felt”.

He said the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 for the whole of the UK was still an “incredibly high number”, and “substantially above the peak in April”.

Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said that more than a quarter of a million severely ill coronavirus patients have been looked after in hospital this year.

“This is not a year that anybody is going to want to remember nor is it a year that across the health service any of us will ever forget,” he said.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the 100,000 death toll was a “national tragedy”.

He added: “We must never become numb to these numbers or treat them as just statistics. Every death is a loved one, a friend, a neighbour, a partner or a colleague. It is an empty chair at the dinner table.”