UK : 1,325 new COVID-19 deaths in almost 24 hours

The United Kingdom has disclosed its largest daily COVID-19 death toll since the start of the pandemic.

A further 1,325 new fatalities were reported on Friday, taking the total death toll to 79,833 — the highest in Europe.

It is the third day in a row that higher than 1,000 new deaths have been recorded.

An additional 68,058 new infections are also recorded — the highest one-day increase the UK has shown since the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

England is two days into a 3rd national lockdown to curb the spread of a COVID-19 variant found to be up to 70 percent is more transmissible.

The country currently is having an incidence rate of over 600 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, with the rate rising to over 800 cases per 100,000 population in the south-east and in Northern Ireland.

In London, where the incidence rate has passed 1,000 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, authorities declared a big incident on Friday with Mayor Sadiq Khan describing the situation as "out of control."

The latest grim people come as the UK recommended the use of the third vaccine on Friday. The first shots of the Moderna vaccine are expected to be delivered in the spring.

The UK vaccinated about 1.5 million forms using the jabs developed by Pfizer/BioNtech and AstraZeneca/Oxford University.

The government aims to protect 15 million people by mid-February, when the lockdown is registered to be lifted.

British hospitals were also on Friday allowed to use two new drugs to treat severely-ill COVID-19 patients.

Tocilizumab and sarilumab, two anti-inflammatory drugs that are typically used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, were found to degrade the risk of death by 24 percent in clinical trials, including 800 people.