As of October 6, 2022, 11,641 confirmed COVID-19 patients were in hospital in the United Kingdom. The number of COVID patients in hospitals first peaked at over 21.6 thousand on April 12, 2020 and dropped as low as 772 on September 11, 2020. However, the number of patients reached a new peak in the winter of 2020/21 with over 39.2 thousand patients in hospital on January 18, 2021.

The total number of cases in the UK can be found here. For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) Press Briefings Corpus is a work in progress to collect and present in a machine readable text dataset of the daily briefings from around the world by government authorities. During the peak of the pandemic, most countries around the world informed their citizens of the status of the pandemic (usually involving an update on the number of infection cases, number of deaths) and other policy-oriented decisions about dealing with the health crisis, such as advice about what to do to reduce the spread of the epidemic.

Usually daily briefings did not occur on a Sunday.

At the moment the dataset includes:

UK/England: Daily Press Briefings by UK Government between 12 March 2020 - 01 June 2020 (70 briefings in total)

Scotland: Daily Press Briefings by Scottish Government between 3 March 2020 - 01 June 2020 (76 briefings in total)

Wales: Daily Press Briefings by Welsh Government between 23 March 2020 - 01 June 2020 (56 briefings in total)

Northern Ireland: Daily Press Briefings by N. Ireland Assembly between 23 March 2020 - 01 June 2020 (56 briefings in total)

World Health Organisation: Press Briefings occuring usually every 2 days between 22 January 2020 - 01 June 2020 (63 briefings in total)

More countries will be added in due course, and we will be keeping this updated to cover the latest daily briefings available.

The corpus is compiled to allow for further automated political discourse analysis (classification).

As of June 13, 2023, there have been almost 768 million cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) worldwide. The disease has impacted almost every country and territory in the world, with the United States confirming around 16 percent of all global cases.

COVID-19: An unprecedented crisis Health systems around the world were initially overwhelmed by the number of coronavirus cases, and even the richest and most prepared countries struggled. In the most vulnerable countries, millions of people lacked access to critical life-saving supplies, such as test kits, face masks, and respirators. However, several vaccines have been approved for use, and more than 13 billion vaccine doses had already been administered worldwide as of March 2023.

The coronavirus in the United Kingdom Over 202 thousand people have died from COVID-19 in the UK, which is the highest number in Europe. The tireless work of the National Health Service (NHS) has been applauded, but the country’s response to the crisis has drawn criticism. The UK was slow to start widespread testing, and the launch of a COVID-19 contact tracing app was delayed by months. However, the UK’s rapid vaccine rollout has been a success story, and around 53.7 million people had received at least one vaccine dose as of July 13, 2022.

There were over 33.9 million people employed in the United Kingdom in the three months to January 2025. This represented a peak for the number of people employed in the country during this provided time period. In general, the number of people employed has consistently increased, with noticeable dips in employment occurring in 2008 due to the global financial crisis, and in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Labor market hot streak in 2022 Although there was a sharp increase in the UK's unemployment rate in the aftermath of COVID-19, the UK labor market bounced back forcefully after this sudden shock. By the middle of 2022, the UK's unemployment rate had recovered to pre-pandemic levels, while the number of job vacancies in the UK reached record highs. Wage growth was, by this point, growing at a much slower rate than inflation, which peaked at 11.1 percent in October 2022. In the two years since this peak, the UK labor market has cooled slightly; with unemployment reaching 4.4 percent by December 2024, and the number of job vacancies falling to the lowest figures since May 2021. Characteristics of UK workers As of 2024, the majority of UK workers were working in the private sector, at over 27.6 million workers. In the same year the size of the UK's public sector workforce stood at approximately 6.1 million, with over two million of these people working for the UK's National Health Service (NHS), and a further 1.66 million in the public education sector. In the UK's private sector, the industry sector which employed the most people was wholesale and retail, which had a workforce of over 4.9 million people, followed by administrative and support service roles at around 3.1 million.

Description This dataset of participant, field blank and quality control liquid-chromatography-mass spectrometry .raw files supports the following article: Changes to the sebum lipidome upon COVID-19 infection observed via rapid sampling from the skin - EClinicalMedicine (thelancet.com) Background The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented demand for testing - for diagnosis and prognosis - as well as for investigation into the impact of the disease on the host metabolism. Sebum sampling has the potential to support both needs by looking at what the virus does to us, rather than looking for the virus itself. Methods and attached dataset description In this pilot study, sebum samples were collected from 67 hospitalised patients (30 COVID-19 positive and 37 COVID-19 negative) by gauze swab. Lipidomics analysis was carried out using liquid chromatography mass spectrometry, identifying 998 reproducible features. Univariate and multivariate statistical analyses were applied to the resulting feature set. The dataset uploaded here represents .raw liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry files for participants (triplicate injections), field blanks and pooled quality control standards, as well as the output peak:area matrix. Findings Lipid levels were depressed in COVID-19 positive participants, indicative of dyslipidemia; p-values of 0·022 and 0·015 were obtained for triglycerides and ceramides respectively, with effect sizes of 0·44 and 0·57. Partial Least Squares-Discriminant Analysis showed separation of COVID-19 positive and negative participants with sensitivity of 57% and specificity of 68%, improving to 79% and 83% respectively when controlled for confounding comorbidities. Interpretation COVID-19 dysregulates many areas of metabolism; in this work we show that the skin lipidome can be added to the list. Given that samples can be provided quickly and painlessly, we conclude that sebum is worthy of future consideration for clinical sampling.

Following a trial run and official release on the 24th of September 2020, the NHS COVID-19 app has been downloaded more than 29 million times in England and Wales, as of December 2021. Developed to complement the NHS Test & Trace in England and the Test, Trace and Protect program in Wales, the app is aimed at increasing the speed and accuracy of contact tracing, and includes features such as local area alerts and venue check-in.

NHS COVID-19 app usage Between the beginning of June 2021 and the end of July 2021, the number of COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom started rising again, reaching the peak of 54,674 on the 21st of July. In the previous week, it was reported that more than 600 thousand users of the NHS COVID-19 app in England and Wales had received a self-isolation alert or “ping,” causing what has been since renamed by the media as a “pingdemic.” The NHS COVID-19 app, which works using Bluetooth technology, registers the devices that the users have been in proximity of, and is programmed to send alerts to all the traced contacts in case the app users test positive for coronavirus. While the app’s tracing measurements are currently being reviewed to decrease the number of alerts sent, two in 10 users have reported switching off the app’s contact tracing function. Moreover, according to a survey of online users in Great Britain, only 22 percent of the online users who have the app are using it correctly, while one in ten reported deleting the app altogether.

Travel health pass and COVID-19 apps In 2021, the rolling out of vaccination plans worldwide prompted health institutions and travel companies to start releasing new apps or updating their current ones to function as health passports. With close to 5,7 million downloads in the first half of 2021, the NHS app was the most downloaded app used to show digital certifications. The CovPass app, which is available to residents in Germany, followed with more than 5.56 million downloads as of the second quarter of 2021. According to a February survey of travelers worldwide, the main concerns over the use of digital health passports related to security risks over personal data being hacked and privacy protection.

Parameter tuning in the UK case.

In 2024, the annual unemployment rate of the United Kingdom is expected to be 4.3 percent, compared with four percent in 2023. Unemployment is forecast to fall to 4.1 percent in 2025, before falling again to four percent in 2026. A common indicator of an economy’s relative health, the unemployment rate has generally been falling in the United Kingdom since its 2011 peak of 8.1 percent. Uptick in unemployment in 2023 In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the unemployment rate in the United Kingdom grew steadily, from just 3.9 percent at the start of 2020, to 5.1 percent by the end of the year. This was followed by a steep decline in unemployment that lasted until August 2022, when the unemployment rate was just 3.5 percent. There was a slight uptick in unemployment following this low, with the unemployment rate rising to 4.3 percent the following July. This has been matched by a fall in the number of UK job vacancies, which reached a peak of 1.3 million in May 2022, but has been falling in every subsequent month, with approximately 932,000 vacancies in January 2024. Other UK key economic indicators Although the UK's labor market was quite well protected from the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, other parts of the economy took a more severe hit. The initial lockdown measures resulted in a huge fall to UK GDP, in April 2020 which took over a year to reach its pre-pandemic size. Economic growth has remained sluggish ever since the initial recovery, with the UK economy alternating between weak growth and slight contractions. The UK even entered a technical recession at the end of 2023, following two quarters of negative growth. Inflation also skyrocketed from late 2021 onwards, reaching a peak of 11.1 percent in October 2022. Even one year after that peak, inflation has proven stubborn to get down, with a rate of 4.6 percent in October 2023.

The youth unemployment rate for those aged between 16 and 24 in the United Kingdom was 14.5 percent in January 2025, compared with 14.7 percent in the previous month. After falling to just 9.2 percent in July 2022, the youth unemployment rate has increased at pace and is almost as high as it was following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Nevertheless, youth unemployment is lower than in the early 2010s, when youth unemployment reached a high of 22.5 percent in November 2011. Almost one million UK youth not in work or education In the fourth quarter of 2024, the number of people aged between 16 and 24 that were not in education, employment, or training (NEET) was 987,000, the highest figure in more than ten years. One of the main reasons for this increase has been the general rise in people being on long-term sick leave since the COVID-19 pandemic, which reached a peak of 2.8 million at the end of 2023. While older adults are still more likely to be on long-term sick, the number of younger workers on long-term sickness has increased more rapidly. In the ten years between 2014 and 2024, the number of 16 to 24-year-olds economically inactive for this reason increased from 138,000 to 271,000.

COVID-19 rate of death, or the known deaths divided by confirmed cases, was over ten percent in Yemen, the only country that has 1,000 or more cases. This according to a calculation that combines coronavirus stats on both deaths and registered cases for 221 different countries. Note that death rates are not the same as the chance of dying from an infection or the number of deaths based on an at-risk population. By April 26, 2022, the virus had infected over 510.2 million people worldwide, and led to a loss of 6.2 million. The source seemingly does not differentiate between "the Wuhan strain" (2019-nCOV) of COVID-19, "the Kent mutation" (B.1.1.7) that appeared in the UK in late 2020, the 2021 Delta variant (B.1.617.2) from India or the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) from South Africa.

Where are these numbers coming from?

The numbers shown here were collected by Johns Hopkins University, a source that manually checks the data with domestic health authorities. For the majority of countries, this is from national authorities. In some cases, like China, the United States, Canada or Australia, city reports or other various state authorities were consulted. In this statistic, these separately reported numbers were put together. Note that Statista aims to also provide domestic source material for a more complete picture, and not to just look at one particular source. Examples are these statistics on the confirmed coronavirus cases in Russia or the COVID-19 cases in Italy, both of which are from domestic sources. For more information or other freely accessible content, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

A word on the flaws of numbers like this

People are right to ask whether these numbers are at all representative or not for several reasons. First, countries worldwide decide differently on who gets tested for the virus, meaning that comparing case numbers or death rates could to some extent be misleading. Germany, for example, started testing relatively early once the country’s first case was confirmed in Bavaria in January 2020, whereas Italy tests for the coronavirus postmortem. Second, not all people go to see (or can see, due to testing capacity) a doctor when they have mild symptoms. Countries like Norway and the Netherlands, for example, recommend people with non-severe symptoms to just stay at home. This means not all cases are known all the time, which could significantly alter the death rate as it is presented here. Third and finally, numbers like this change very frequently depending on how the pandemic spreads or the national healthcare capacity. It is therefore recommended to look at other (freely accessible) content that dives more into specifics, such as the coronavirus testing capacity in India or the number of hospital beds in the UK. Only with additional pieces of information can you get the full picture, something that this statistic in its current state simply cannot provide.

Health behaviors that do not effectively prevent disease can negatively impact psychological wellbeing and potentially drain motivations to engage in more effective behavior, potentially creating higher health risk. Despite this, studies linking “moral foundations” (i.e., concerns about harm, fairness, purity, authority, ingroup, and/or liberty) to health behaviors have generally been limited to a narrow range of behaviors, specifically effective ones. We therefore explored the degree to which moral foundations predicted a wider range of not only effective but ineffective (overreactive) preventative behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 1, participants from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States reported their engagement in these preventative behaviors and completed a COVID-specific adaptation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire during the pandemic peak. While differences occurred across countries, authority considerations consistently predicted increased engagement in both effective preventative behaviors but also ineffective overreactions, even when controlling for political ideology. By contrast, purity and liberty considerations reduced intentions to engage in effective behaviors like vaccination but had no effect on ineffective behaviors. Study 2 revealed that the influence of moral foundations on U.S participants’ behavior remained stable 5-months later, after the pandemic peak. These findings demonstrate that the impact of moral foundations on preventative behaviors is similar across a range of western democracies, and that recommendations by authorities can have unexpected consequences in terms of promoting ineffective—and potentially damaging—overreactive behaviors. The findings underscore the importance of moral concerns for the design of health interventions that selectively promote effective preventative behavior.

As of May 2, 2023, the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) had spread to almost every country in the world, and more than 6.86 million people had died after contracting the respiratory virus. Over 1.16 million of these deaths occurred in the United States.

Waves of infections Almost every country and territory worldwide have been affected by the COVID-19 disease. At the end of 2021 the virus was once again circulating at very high rates, even in countries with relatively high vaccination rates such as the United States and Germany. As rates of new infections increased, some countries in Europe, like Germany and Austria, tightened restrictions once again, specifically targeting those who were not yet vaccinated. However, by spring 2022, rates of new infections had decreased in many countries and restrictions were once again lifted.

What are the symptoms of the virus? It can take up to 14 days for symptoms of the illness to start being noticed. The most commonly reported symptoms are a fever and a dry cough, leading to shortness of breath. The early symptoms are similar to other common viruses such as the common cold and flu. These illnesses spread more during cold months, but there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that temperature impacts the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Medical advice should be sought if you are experiencing any of these symptoms.

During the peak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis (March-April 2020) when many countries worldwide introduced lockdown measures, e-commerce share in total retail sales saw proportions that were not seen before. In the United Kingdom, where an already mature e-commerce market exists, e-commerce share saw as high as 31.3 percent, before stabilizing in the subsequent periods. In the most current period (as of January 31, 2021), United Kingdom, United States and Canada were the leading countries where e-commerce had a higher share as a proportion of total retail, at 24, 17, and 15 percent, respectively.

In 2023, there were 600,000 trips from Norway to the United Kingdom, which marked an increase from the previous year. While visitation rates dropped significantly in 2020 and 2021 due to travel restrictions imposed during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, they had already been declining since 2014, following a peak of 877,000 trips.

In the UK, the number of daily active users (DAU) of Zoom reached a peak of roughly 1.7 million towards the end of November, 2020. The video communications app saw the start of a huge increase in its DAU around the same time that the coronavirus outbreak hit the UK, as more and more people took part in virtual meetings for work, as well as for socializing with family and friends. This is according to data from Airnow.

There were over 33.8 million people employed in the United Kingdom in the three months to December 2024. This represented a peak for the number of people employed in the country during this provided time period. In general, the number of people employed has consistently increased, with noticeable dips in employment occurring in 2008 due to the global financial crisis, and in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Labor market hot streak in 2022 Although there was a sharp increase in the UK's unemployment rate in the aftermath of COVID-19, the UK labor market bounced back forcefully after this sudden shock. By the middle of 2022, the UK's unemployment rate had recovered to pre-pandemic levels, while the number of job vacancies in the UK reached record highs. Wage growth was, by this point, growing at a much slower rate than inflation, which peaked at 11.1 percent in October 2022. In the two years since this peak, the UK labor market has cooled slightly; with unemployment reaching 4.4 percent by December 2024, and the number of job vacancies falling to the lowest figures since May 2021. Characteristics of UK workers As of 2024, the majority of UK workers were working in the private sector, at over 27.6 million workers. In the same year the size of the UK's public sector workforce stood at approximately 6.1 million, with over two million of these people working for the UK's National Health Service (NHS), and a further 1.66 million in the public education sector. In the UK's private sector, the industry sector which employed the most people was wholesale and retail, which had a workforce of over 4.9 million people, followed by administrative and support service roles at around 3.1 million.

There was a peak of just over 2.84 million people not working due to long-term sickness in the UK in the fourth quarter of 2023, with this figure falling slightly in subsequent quarters. This figure has been rising considerably since 2019, when there were just over two million people economically inactive for this reason. Since the third quarter of 2021, long-term and temporary sickness has been the main reason that people were economically inactive, accounting for 32.1 percent of economic inactivity in the fourth quarter of 2024. What is driving the increase in long-term sickness? It is unclear if there are any specific reasons for the continued growth of long-term sickness in the UK. As of 2022, some of the most common health conditions cited as the reason for long-term sickness were to do with mental health issues, with 313,00 suffering from mental illness, and a further 282,000 for depression-related illness. It is also likely that the COVID-19 pandemic caused an impact, with around 1.8 million people in April 2022 reporting an experience of Long Covid. In general, while the majority of people on long-term sick leave are over the age of 50, there has been a noticeable increase in those aged under 35 being off on long-term sickness. Between 2019 and 2022, the number of those aged between 16 and 34 on long-term sickness increased by 140,000, compared with just 32,000 for those aged between 35 and 49. UK labor market set to continue cooling in 2025? In 2022, the UK labor market was slightly more weighted in favor of workers and people looking for work than usual. Unemployment fell to historical levels, while job vacancies reached a peak of more than 1.3 million in May. Wage growth also remained strong during this period, although as this occurred at a time of high inflation, wages fell in real terms for a long period between November 2021 and June 2023. Although the job market continued to show signs of resilience, for some time, there are signs this is now changing. In December 2024, the UK unemployment rate was 4.4 percent, a joint post-pandemic high, while in the same month job vacancies fell to their lowest level since May 2021.

Optimism of business owners for their own business in the eating and drinking out sector in the United Kingdom reached a peak of 83 percent in February 2020, its highest level since the time of the EU referendum four years earlier. However, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic contributed to another large drop in industry leaders' optimism for both the general market and own businesses, with values as low as 5 and 15 percent respectively in April 2020.

As of December 2024, there were around 4.39 million self-employed workers in the United Kingdom. During this provided time-period, self-employment in the UK has grown steadily, from a low of just 3.2 million in December 2000, to a peak of over five million at the start of 2020. After the COVID-19 pandemic, however, self-employment has fallen to levels not seen since the middle of 2015 and has struggled to recover to its pre-pandemic peak. Demographics of the self-employed Between 1992 and 2023, there has consistently been more men self-employed than women, with recent figures showing that over 2.74 million men, and 1.62 million women were self-employed. As of 2022, the most numerous self-employed age group was those aged between 45 and 54 years old, reaching just over 1.3 million individuals, indicating that middle-aged people have the highest self-employment rates. In the same year, around 757,000 self-employed workers in the UK were based in the London region, with a further 644,000 based in South East England. Self-employment support scheme In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government unveiled various measures to mitigate the economic costs to businesses and individuals. For self-employed workers, this manifested itself as the Self-Employment Income-Support Scheme, which was in its third iteration, or tranche, by December 2020. During the first tranche, which ran from March to July, there were 2.7 million claims made in total, with claims to the second and third tranches numbering 2.4 million and 1.7 million respectively. As of December 13, 2020, the overall value of these claims amounted to 14.5 billion British pounds.