No new patient deaths at Royal Bolton Hospital have been linked to coronavirus.

Figures published by NHS England over the weekend showed no patients had died after contracting covid-19.

The borough’s hospital has now seen 221 deaths linked to the deadly virus.

Over 294,000 cases of covid-19 have been confirmed across the nation, with 1,040 people in the borough testing positive for the virus as of 9am on Saturday morning.

The news came as Boris Johnson said people should be able to “shop with confidence” as non-essential stores reopen in England today.

Speaking during a visit to the Westfield shopping centre in east London, the Prime Minister said he hoped to see a “gradual” build-up in the numbers of people returning to the high street.

He said: “I am very optimistic about the opening up that is going to happen tomorrow,”

“I think people should shop and shop with confidence, but they should of course observe the rules on social distancing and do it as safely as possible.”

Mr Johnson said that “probably” fewer than one-in-a-thousand people were now infected with coronavirus, allowing “more margin for manoeuvre” in easing the two-metre rule.

“As we get the numbers down, so it becomes one-in-a-thousand, one-in-sixteen hundred, maybe fewer, your chances of being, two metres one metre or even a foot away from somebody who has the virus are obviously going down statistically, so you start to build some more margin for manoeuvre, and we’ll be looking at that and keeping it under constant review,” he said.