A further seven deaths have been recorded in patients with coronavirus in the latest 24-hour period.

Public Health England released their latest figures at 4pm yesterday (January 8), which include deaths recorded within 28 days of the patient's first Covid-19 test result.

The latest daily deaths were as follows:

Allerdale - 0

Barrow - 0

Carlisle - 4

Copeland - 1

Eden - 1

South Lakeland -1

Data for the number of deaths with Covid-19 on the death certificate for the week commencing December 25 - the latest figures - show there were the following number in each area:

Allerdale - 2

Barrow - 2

Carlisle - 3

Copeland - 4

Eden - 1

South Lakeland - 11

Figures for the number of new coronavirus cases on January 8 were as follows:

Allerdale - 103

Barrow - 69

Carlisle - 184

Copeland - 70

Eden - 51

South Lakeland - 43

Meanwhile, Susan Michie, professor of health psychology at University College London, said the current lockdown was "too lax".

The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) member told BBC Radio 4's Today: "When you look at the data, it shows that almost 90 per cent of people are overwhelmingly sticking to the rules despite the fact we're also seeing more people out and about.

"I think one of the explanations for that is that actually this is quite a lax lockdown because we've still got a lot of household contact, people go in and out of each other's houses.

"If you're a key nurse, a non-essential tradesperson, a nanny, you have mass gatherings in terms of religious events, nurseries being open and, really importantly, you have this wide definition of critical workers so we have 30-50 per cent of (school) classes full-up at the moment and therefore you've got very busy public transport with people going to and from all these things."

She added: "It is definitely too lax, because if you think about it and compare ourselves with March, what do we have now?

"We have the winter season and the virus survives longer in the cold, plus people spend more time indoors and we know aerosol transmission, which happens indoors, is a very big source of transmission for this virus.

"And secondly we have this new variant which is 50-70 per cent more infectious. You put those two things together, alongside the NHS being in crisis, we should have a stricter rather than less strict lockdown than we had back in March."

Worst is still to come

Dr Justin Varney, director of public health at Birmingham City Council, said hospitals had still not seen the full extent of patients who caught coronavirus over Christmas.

The former GP told BBC Radio 4's Today: "I think we're very worried. What we're seeing now is in the hospital today are the people going in who caught coronavirus about two to three weeks ago.

"So we still haven't seen the impact in the NHS of the rapid rise that we saw around December 28-29 after the Christmas bubble and after we started to see the new variant arriving in the region.

"It is going to get a lot, lot worse unless we really get this under control but some of that is already baked into the system and it is going to play out over the next week or two."