You asked
How many people have died from Covid-19 only in England?
As in, they were admitted to hospital and died ONLY due to Covid-19. I can see the figures that you publish online,but these are deaths within a 28 days of a positive test, so they could of died from other causes, I just want to know the exact figure from 1st Feb 2020 until the 30th December 2020 of people that have died due to COVID-19 and not anything else.
We said
Thank you for your request.
COVID-19 deaths within 28 days of a positive test
The mortality data published by ONS are derived from the information provided on a death certificate. For Scotland and Northern Ireland statistics please contact National Records Scotland and NISRA respectively.
Deaths from COVID-19 may include cases where the doctor completing the death certificate diagnosed possible cases of COVID-19, for example, where this was based on relevant symptoms but no test for the virus was conducted. This differs to the data published on the GOV.UK website which are counts of all causes of death where a positive test for COVID-19 has been confirmed.
We do not have access to data on when the test was conducted as this is not recorded on the death certificate. Deaths with a positive test are coded using the ICD10 code U0.71 and those with suspected COVID-19 but no test has been conducted are coded with ICD10 U0.72.
COVID-19 deaths in England with no pre-existing condition
We have been producing Deaths involving COVID-19, England and Wales in the response to COVID-19. This publication provides a greater insight into the leading underlying causes of death groups for deaths occurring in England and Wales between March and June 2020.
We define a pre-existing condition here as the last health condition mentioned on the first part of the death certificate when it came before the coronavirus (COVID-19) or was an independent contributory factor in the death, mentioned in part II. Where only COVID-19 was recorded on the death certificate, or COVID-19 and subsequent conditions caused by COVID-19 were recorded, we refer to these deaths as having "No pre-existing conditions".
COVID-19 deaths in England where there was no pre-existing condition between March and June 2020 are included below, this can be found on table 5.
- No pre-existing condition: England (Between March and June 2020) - 4169
This publication had been paused in the summer of 2020 due to the decrease in the number of deaths. However, owing to public demand, we have been reassessing the possibility of resuming this publication.
We have now reached a decision, and we plan to include the analysis referenced in your request in our Deaths registered monthly in England and Wales publication, starting from 26 February 2021.
As part of these plans we will update the information we have already published. This is because the deaths in the tables you cited are based on the date a death occurred and not on the date a death was registered. This will enable us to include any deaths that occurred before July 2020, but had not yet been registered by the time we published the last update for Deaths involving COVID-19, England and Wales.
As such, the information you have requested from July onwards is considered exempt under Section 22(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, whereby information is exempt from release if there is a view to publish the information in the future. Furthermore, as a central government department and producer of official statistics, we need to have the freedom to be able to determine our own publication timetables. This is to allow us to deal with the necessary preparation, administration and context of publications. It would be unreasonable to consider disclosure when to do so would undermine our functions.
This exemption is subject to a public interest test. We recognise the desirability of information being freely available and this is considered by ONS when publication schedules are set in accordance with the Code of Practice for Statistics. The need for timely data must be balanced against the practicalities of applying statistical skill and judgement to produce the high quality, assured data needed to inform decision-making. If this balance is incorrectly applied, then we run the risk of decisions being based on inaccurate data which is arguably not in the public interest. This will have an impact on public trust in official statistics in a time when accuracy of official statistics is more important to the public than ever before.
Deaths 'involving' and 'due to' COVID-19 in England and Wales, 2020
Figure 2 of our Deaths registered weekly bulletin shows the number of deaths due to COVID-19 and the number of deaths involving COVID-19 in England and Wales:
"Due to COVID-19" refers only to deaths where COVID-19 was recorded as the underlying cause of death on the death certificate.
"Involving COVID-19" refers to deaths that had COVID-19 mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, whether as the underlying cause or not.
Please see the download data option at the bottom of figure 2, which will provide a spreadsheet showing this data for each week of 2020. COVID-19 is the underlying cause of death in around 90% of deaths where it was mentioned on the death certificate. However, these figures do not exclude other secondary causes that may have contributed to a death.
The following are the summed totals of COVID-19 deaths that were registered up to week ending 1st January 2021:
- Deaths involving COVID-19 (underlying or secondary cause) - 80,830
- Deaths due to COVID-19 (underlying cause) - 73,444
Provisional monthly death registration data for England and Wales, broken down by sex, age and country are available in this monthly publication: Monthly mortality analysis, England and Wales. This publication contains data from July onwards and includes deaths due to COVID-19 and leading causes of death. Leading causes in England are also available on table 11a and includes figures for the five-year average.
If you would like to discuss these statistics further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk