Up to 20,000 people in Wales could die amid the coronavirus outbreak in a worst case scenario, the country's health minister Vaughan Gething has predicted.

He wasn't scaremongering but explaining the decision by Welsh National Health Service to suspend non-urgent surgical procedures and outpatient appointments. 'That's going to be the way the government behaves, because our priority is to save as many lives as possible,' he said. 'In an average flu season across the UK, there are 810,000 deaths,' he pointed out. 'In the worst-case scenario, as you know in Wales, for coronavirus could be over 20,000 deaths.'

Wales, which enjoys certain powers under the devolutionary form of government, has a population of 3.14 million, compared with 55.98 million for England, out of a UK figure of 66.44 million. That would extrapolate to a death toll of over 2,00,000 across the UK in a worst case scenario.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has already said: 'I must level with the British public: many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.'

Each year, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 increasingly affluent people from India come to the UK for holidays and other reasons, especially from May onwards to escape the burning temperatures at home. They enjoy the theatre, restaurants, shopping and sightseeing. Whether this pattern of behaviour will change remains to be seen, particularly as doctors say the coronavirus transmits less readily at higher temperatures.

This is why the strategy in the UK is to try and push the peak of the outbreak to late April and even into May Among decisions taken by Johnson is one to postpone local polls, including the mayoral election in London, which was due on May 7, by a year. This means that Labour's Sadiq Khan, who was seeking re-election after four years in power as the western world's first Muslim mayor, gets a 12-month extension.

Johnson is under pressure to introduce further restrictions on movement.