NEW figures have shown that almost 20,000 care home residents have died after contracting the coronavirus.

Care home deaths as a result of COVID-19 have been severely underreported throughout the pandemic, with the full scale of fatalities only starting to show with the release of new figures from the Office for National Statistic.

Up to June 12, 127 deaths had been reported by facilities in East Lancashire, up from 57 at the end of May.

Of those deaths, 25 occurred in care homes in Blackburn, 24 in Burnley, 35 in Hyndburn, 23 in Rossendale, four in the Ribble Valley and 26 in Pendle.

Speaking about the figures, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said there had been ‘far too many lives lost in care homes’ and that the Government would go over and look at whether an earlier lockdown could have prevented some deaths.

He disputed claims that people were pushed into care homes from the NHS to make space in hospitals.

“What we certainly wanted to do to was to ensure we had the space in the NHS, that’s absolutely right, but what I’m told is every decision to move people out of the beds in the NHS was taken on a clinical basis and not in any way intended to endanger the care homes,” he said.