FOI REF: FOI/2023/1142
You asked
Total Population by Total Deaths by Vaccine Status. I am confused with the exact meaning of person-years and the values in the age standardised mortality rate. I would like to see a clear percentage of how many deaths have occurred for each month for 'Ever vaccinated' against Unvaccinated. (You can include the other vaccine values too). But I really would like to see the total population for these values for each month and the total amount of all cause deaths and the deaths for each group for each month.
We said
Thank you for your request.
We use person-years because someone's vaccine status changes over time, therefore we can only say how many people are unvaccinated, have 1 dose etc on a particular day, whereas we need to look over a range of time to calculate the results.
Person-years considers the time people spend in each vaccination status. So, 1 person spending 6 months unvaccinated and 2 people spending 3 months each unvaccinated would contribute a total of 1 year to the person-years.
We calculate the number of person-years each person spends in each vaccination state per month and sum to get the total person-years for the mortality rates.
Further information can be found in our COVID-19 age-standardised mortality rates by vaccination status, England: methodology article.
With regards to your request for further data, we can create bespoke tables as part of our User Requested Dataset service. Special extracts and tabulations of mortality data are available to order and are subject to disclosure control, legal frameworks, resources and agreement to costs under the ONS Charging policy.
As this information is reasonably accessible via another route, even if only accessible on payment, Section 21(2)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies.
If you would like to discuss this service further or request a quote for a bespoke tabulation, please contact Health Analysis and Pandemic Insight Customer Service team at Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.