Another 449 people have died from coronavirus in hospitals across the UK.

The toll was updated after England recorded another 331 deaths in hospitals, Wales another 21, Scotland another 83, and 14 in Northern Ireland.

The Government is due to announce its official death toll later today, which will include deaths in care homes and the wider community.

The latest hospital figures emerged after Boris Johnson set a new target of testing 200,000 people a day for coronavirus by the end of the month.

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The Prime Minister said the new goal is an ‘ambition’ after the Government was widely criticised for its first goal of 100,000 tests a day by the end of April.

Health secretary Matt Hancock set the first target on April 2 and told the Government’s daily briefing last week that testing figures had hit 122,347 on April 30.

He was later accused of ‘bending the rules’ in order to come to that figure, as 27,497 of those counted were home tests and 12,872 were sent out to satellite sites, suggesting just 81,978 of the tests were actually completed and processed.

Labour leader Keir Starmer, grilling Mr Johnson today, said testing numbers across the UK have fallen back since last week, when the government claimed to have hit its target.

Mr Johnson said the opposition leader was right to pay tribute to the work done to increase testing last week and that his ambition is to hit 200,000 a day by the end of this month ‘and then go even higher’.

The PM made his first Commons appearance since recovering from coronavirus at Prime Minister’s Questions, telling MPs: ‘It’s good to be back even though I’ve been away for longer than I had intended.

‘I’d like to pay tribute today to the 107 NHS and 29 care workers and all those who have sadly died from coronavirus. I know the sympathies of the House are with their family and friends.’

Sir Keir asked the PM why contract tracing was happening in the UK but abandoned in mid-March.

He said: ‘We were told at the time that this was because it was quote “not an appropriate mechanism” but yesterday the deputy chief medical officer said it was to do with testing capacity.

‘So can the Prime Minister just clarify the position for us?’

Mr Johnson replied: ‘As I think is readily apparent Mr Speaker to everybody who studied the situation and I think as the scientists would confirm, the difficulty in mid-March was that the tracing capacity that we had, that had been useful as he rightly says in the containment phase of the epidemic, that capacity was no longer useful or relevant since the transmission from individuals within the UK meant that it exceeded our capacity then.

‘Now the value of the testing, tracking and tracing operation that we’re setting up now is that as we come out of the epidemic and as we get the new cases down, we will have a team that will genuinely be able to track and trace hundreds of thousands of people across the country and thereby to drive down the epidemic.’

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