PENSIONERS are demanding government action after figures revealed today that the number of Covid-19 victims who are over 80 has soared to its highest level for more than a year.

In the week ending January 21, over-80s made up 63.2 per cent of the deaths in England and Wales recorded with coronavirus on the death certificate, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Although numbers of deaths have fallen, the proportion in the over-80s age group is the highest since December 2020.

And people aged 60 to 79 accounted for a further 30.7 per cent of deaths in the week to January 21, the ONS found.

Together the two age groups represented 93.9 per cent of Covid-19 deaths.

In the week to December 18 2020, the deaths rate for over-80s was 64 per cent: 2,115 out of 3,306 deaths and the proportion of Covid-19 deaths among the over-80s fell to 37.9 per cent in the week up to July 2 2021.

Britain’s largest campaigning organisation for pensioners, the National Pensioners’ Convention, said that the figures were unacceptable given government pledges that elderly people would be protected after Covid-19 swept through care homes in the first months of the pandemic in 2020.

Convention general secretary Jan Shortt said: “We will be contacting the Department for Health & Social Care with some critical questions in regard to the breakdown of these figures — such as underlying ill health and whether the death took place in a care home, hospital or an individual’s own home.

“What is worrying is that it is still very difficult to get a GP appointment if you do not have the technology to book online.

“Overall, this government should be ashamed that these figures are so biased towards the older generation — a generation that they repeatedly ostracise and condemn to poverty.”

The surge in deaths coincides with the surge in coronavirus infections in December driven by the omicron variant, which pushed the overall number of Covid-19 deaths to their highest level since spring last year.

But the 1,355 deaths involving coronavirus in England and Wales that occurred in the week to January 21 is still far below the 9,064 that occurred in the week to January 22 2021.