In total, some 16,000 people in the Netherlands died from coronavirus in the first nine months of the pandemic, national statistics agency CBS said on Wednesday.

Nearly 9,300 of the coronavirus victims were living in residential care when they died.

Of them, 13,497 were confirmed cases and the rest suspected, the agency said. In November, the last month for which figures have been calculated, 3,174 people died of coronavirus, of whom 1,732 lived in residential care.

The CBS bases its calculations on local authority information and official cause of death figures.

Testing was limited in the early days of the pandemic so the official number of coronavirus deaths is an underestimation. According to public health institute RIVM, just under 16,000 people with confirmed coronavirus have died up to the end of March.