The crisis has seen citizens ordered to stay at home and businesses forced to shut during four weeks of restrictions on daily life without precedent in British peacetime history. The lockdown was extended on Thursday for at least three more weeks.

Meanwhile, Britain’s largest representative body for care homes on Saturday warned the number of people killed by the coronavirus in Britain’s care homes could be as high as 7,500.

The figure is more than five times higher than the estimate of 1,400 suggested by the government earlier this week.

“Without testing, it is very difficult to give an absolute figure,” Martin Green, chief executive of Care England, told The Daily Telegraph. “However, if we look at some of the death rates since April 1 and compare them with previous years’ rates, we estimate a figure of about 7,500 people may have died as a result of Covid-19.”

It is also far in excess of the 217 care home deaths recorded by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) up to April 3, the most recent date for which official data is available.

Britain’s official coronavirus toll only includes deaths recorded in hospitals, which can take some days to register fatalities.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said this week that its data suggested that deaths in hospital accounted for around 85 per cent of all coronavirus fatalities in the country.

This figure was calculated by comparing overall excess deaths in the country to the official coronavirus toll.

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But the Care England estimate would mean that deaths in hospital account for a far lower proportion of the true total than the ONS data suggested.

“This is a shocking and utterly heartbreaking estimate that will send a chill down the spine of anyone with a loved one living in a care home,” said Caroline Abrahams, charity director at the Age UK charity. “As we have feared for some time, what’s going on in care homes – not only here but in many other countries too – is a tragedy in the making.”

Care England did not publish the data underlying its estimate, but Health Secretary Matt Hancock told parliament’s health and social care committee on Friday that figures would be published “very shortly”.

Care home bosses have accused the government of a “shambolic” response to the sector’s crisis, particularly over “haphazard” deliveries of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Around 94 per cent of care home beds in Britain are in private hands, with “a large number of them owned by international private companies”, according to The Centre for Health and the Public Interest think tank.

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Concern over PPE was not restricted to care homes, with frontline staff in some of Britain’s state-run hospitals warning they could run out this weekend.

Chris Hopson, chairman of NHS Providers, said we have “reached the point where national stock of fully fluid repellent gowns and coveralls (is) exhausted”.

A leaked Public Health England document revealed health workers were being asked to reuse protective gowns and masks as a “last resort”.