Covid: Was there a North-South divide in England?

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed many of the fault lines in our society, not least in the disproportionately high number of deaths of people from ethnic minorities.

Now this programme can reveal it may also have laid bare a north-south divide during the first wave of the virus.

Figures show that the proportion of deaths in the north of England were 14 per cent higher than the south between March and July.

In today’s other developments, there were 26,688 new Covid cases recorded in the last 24 hours and another 191 people have died, bringing the total number of deaths to 44,158.