Human trials of a potential coronavirus vaccine developed at the University of Oxford are to begin on Thursday, health secretary Matt Hancock has announced.

And one member of the Oxford team said that if trials are successful, millions of doses of vaccine could be available for use by the autumn of this year, in a breakthrough which would potentially signal the start of the world’s slow emergence from an outbreak which has already claimed 175,000 lives and caused devastating economic damage.

Speaking at the daily Downing Street press conference, Mr Hancock said the government was “throwing everything” at the search for a vaccine and announced he was providing £20m to the Oxford team to help fund its clinical trials, with a further £22.5m going to researchers at Imperial College London.

Despite a normal development time of 18 months or more for a vaccine, the Oxford researchers led by Professor Sarah Gilbert believe large-scale production could be under way as early as September – about nine months after the novel virus was first spotted in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Mr Hancock said the government will now invest in manufacturing capability so that if either the Oxford or Imperial vaccine works safely, it will be made available to the UK public “as early as humanly possible”.

The UK’s coronavirus death toll in hospitals rose to 17,337, with a further 828 Covid-19 patient fatalities reported.

Office for National Statistics figures showed that the week ending 10 April was the deadliest in England and Wales since 2000, with a third of the total 18,516 deaths registered being linked to coronavirus.

Figures showed the total of 13,121 Covid-19 deaths in all settings – including care homes, hospices and private homes – recorded by the ONS in the period to 10 April was about 40 per cent higher than the 9,288 hospital deaths recorded by the Department of Health over the same timescale.

Deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam said that hospital bed occupancy for coronavirus patients continues to drop in London and “plateau” in other parts of the country, but warned: “We remain in a situation of danger … We are not out of danger at this point.”

Downing Street said it “absolutely” stands by Mr Hancock’s target of 100,000 daily coronavirus tests by the end of April, despite just 18,206 tests being carried out in the most recent 24-hour period