Total deaths and deaths of police officers from COVID-19 with no pre-existing conditions from April 2020 to February 2021

You asked

Please provide two figures between the periods of 1 April 2020 to 28 February 2021:

How many people in England and Wales have died purely of COVID-19 and not with COVID-19. By this I mean people with absolutely no pre-existing serious health conditions.

The second figure I would grateful if you could provide is deaths in the police force in England and Wales of officers dying from COVID-19, again not with COVID-19 and serious underlying health conditions, for the same date period?

We said

Thank you for your enquiry.

Please note:

Our COVID-19 mortality data are different from the figures on COVID-19 deaths published on the government's COVID-19 dashboard which shows 'deaths within 28 days of a positive test'. You can read a blog by Professor John Newton of Public Health England about the complexities of counting COVID-19 deaths and the different methods used.

You can read in detail about the coding of causes of death and identifying the underlying cause in the ONS User guide to mortality statistics and the WHO International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) instruction manual.

Deaths from COVID-19 with no pre-existing conditions:

Please see table 2 of the following dataset: Pre-existing conditions of people who died due to COVID-19, England and Wales - Office for National Statistics. This provides deaths from COVID-19 with no pre-existing conditions from January 2020 to December 2020 by two broad age groups (1 to 64 and 65+). We do not currently hold this analysis for 2021.

You may also be interested in Figure 2 of our Deaths registered weekly bulletin. This shows the number of deaths due to COVID-19 and the number of deaths involving COVID-19 with "due to" referring only to deaths where COVID-19 was recorded as the underlying cause of death on the death certificate and "involving" referring to deaths that had COVID-19 mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, whether as an underlying cause or not.

Please see the 'download data' option at the bottom of Figure 2.

Please see the following summed totals for COVID-19 from January 2020 to week ending 9 April 2021:

• Deaths involving COVID-19 (underlying or contributory cause): 137,058
• Deaths due to COVID-19 (underlying cause): 122,788

Here is the summed totals from 30 January 2021 until latest available data of 9 April 20201. Weekly deaths starts on Saturday, so we have taken the nearest available date to 1 February 2021:

• Deaths involving COVID-19 (underlying or contributory cause): 34,504
• Deaths due to COVID-19 (underlying cause): 29,875

Deaths of police officers from COVID-19 with no pre-existing conditions:

Unfortunately, we do not hold analysis showing the number of deaths of serving police officers who died of COVID-19 with no pre-existing conditions.

However, using the Coronavirus (COVID-19) related deaths by occupation, England and Wales - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk) publication, there have been the following deaths involving police officers from March 2020 to 28th December 2020. This is the latest available data.