THE NHS trust running Basildon & Thurrock Hospital has the second worst Covid death rate in England, figures suggest.

According to the latest figures Mid and South Essex Hospital Trust, which looks after Basildon as well as Chelmford's Broomfields Hospital and Southend Hospital has had 1,313 Covid-related deaths during a total of more than 35,000 Covid bed days.

The term 'Covid bed days' refers to the number of days that hospital beds have been occupied by Covid patients, with each day a Covid patient is an in-patient counting as one.

The figure for the three local hospitals equals a death rate of 37.27 per 1,000 Covid bed days.

The only trust in the country faring worse is Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Trust in the north west of England with 44.45 deaths per 1,000 bed days.

The figures relate to cases between March 25, 2020 and January 2021.

Other trusts in the region that have fared badly include Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust and Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust in Harlow.

The figures make stark reading for health professionals struggling to tackle the disease in parts of the country most affected by Covid.

More than four in ten hospital beds in Essex are now occupied by Covid-19 patients. At 4pm on January 5, there were 1,038 beds occupied by Covid patients in hospitals in the region – 42.2 per cent of the 2,461 beds available.

It means that overall, on that date there were 191 unoccupied general and acute beds available across the whole of the area, for a population of more than one million people.

The figures, from NHS England, show Princess Alexandra Trust had the highest proportion of beds filled with Covid-positive patients in Essex, with 194 occupied beds out of a total of 384 – 50.5 per cent. Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust followed with 519 beds used for Covid patients out of 1,065, or 48.7 per cent of all beds.

Nationally, more than a quarter of hospital beds were in use for Covid patients as of 5 January at 4pm – 21,693 out of 84,948. That is a small decrease compared to the previous day, when 21,716 beds were used for Covid patients, the highest number since these figures were first published.