You asked

Please can you provide the following information:

  1. A weekly data set of actual COVID-19 deaths that have occurred in patients with whom have no pre-existing medical conditions / co-morbidities; up to present date (13/04/2021) for the U.K, if the data is available.
  2. A weekly or monthly figure for unconfirmed COVID-19 deaths (deaths that have occurred without a positive test result from either a lateral flow or PCR test),  up to present date of the data being collected.
  3. A total monthly figure of tests (in totality) undertaken by staff members within the U.K, up to present date of the data being collected.
  4. A monthly figure in a easy read document  (to date) of all staff within U.K, who have been required to retest after a positive lateral flow result, with a PCR test.
  5. Should a staff member or an inpatient receive a 2nd positive test result, are both positive test results being inputted in to the daily figures as two positive cases? Or is there differentiation between the groups?.
  6. At what CT value is the PCR test conducted at? And is this individualised to a Trust or set nationally.
  7. What has been identified the false positive rate to be of the PCR test to date ?

We said

​Thank you for your enquiry.

  1. COVID deaths by pre-existing condition

Unfortunately, we do not hold analysis showing weekly data for COVID-19 deaths with pre-existing conditions  In order to fulfil this request, we would need use to create bespoke analysis. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Public Authorities are not obligated to create information to respond to requests. We therefore consider this to be information not held.

However, please see the following analysis, which may be of interest:

For January to July 2020, this information is available in our Deaths involving COVID-19, England and Wales - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk) publication. Table 6a shows deaths involving COVID and pre-existing conditions for ages 0-44 and then 5-year age band after the age of 45.

We also hold the following analysis: Pre-existing conditions of people who died due to COVID-19, England and Wales - Office for National Statistics. This provides deaths from January 2020 to December 2020 by two age groups in the dataset in table 2. This is the latest data available.

England

Wales

2021 data will be published on 20 May 2021.

2. COVID-19 deaths without PCR test

For deaths involving COVID-19, whether or not there was a positive test result is only one piece of information to be taken into account, alongside the patient's symptoms and other evidence. So, a death can be certified as involving COVID-19 without a positive test, based on any sound medical evidence, like observed symptoms or X-ray images of the lungs. In the absence of a test result, the doctor may sometimes certify the death as 'suspected' COVID-19.

ONS data as described here 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.

Unfortunately, we would be unable to provide you with weekly data for COVID-19 deaths without a PCR test. In order to fulfil this request, we would need to create bespoke analysis. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Public Authorities are not obligated to create information to respond to requests. We therefore consider this to be information not held.

However, we do hold the following analysis, which may be of interest:

For COVID-19 deaths with a positive test result, we use ICD-10 code U0.71 and for suspected COVID we use ICD-10 U0.72.  You can find this information in our Monthly mortality analysis in the "Definition of COVID" paragraph as a cumulative total.

As of our March publication (latest available data), Of the 122,683 deaths due to COVID-19, 4,009 (3.3%) were classified as "suspected" COVID-19. Including all deaths involving COVID-19 (137,570 deaths), "suspected" COVID-19 was recorded on 3.3% (4,587 deaths) of all deaths involving COVID-19 in England and Wales. This information will be updated with April deaths on 22nd May 2021.

3, 4, 5 & 6. COVID-19 tests taken by staff and PCR testing

The COVID-19 Infection Survey (CIS) is a household survey which refers to the number of current COVID-19 infections within the community population; community in this instance refers to private residential households and it excludes those in hospitals, care homes or other institutional settings.

In response to questions 3 and 4, in the dataset accompanying our 22 February 2021 article, on tabs **3a and 3b** you can find the percentage of people testing positive by occupation, the sample size for each occupation group will tell you how many people in each occupation were tested in England.  Alternatively, daily publication of testing numbers are found on the Government COVID-19 dashboard. These figures can be found daily and testing figures can be separated by pillar.

Public Health England (PHE) are responsible for PCR testing so would be better placed to assist with your queries on testing. They can be contacted via email at wn_coronavirus@phe.gov.uk.

We publish percentage and Ct values of COVID-19 cases in the technical dataset accompanying our weekly bulletin. These can be found on **tab 1a** for the UK and **tab 1b** for a breakdown by English regions.  

7. False positive rate

A test's specificity measures how often the test correctly identifies those who do not have the virus, in effect it is a check of the false positive rate of a test; the higher a test's specificity, the lower the number of false positives. We know the specificity of our RT-PCR test must be very close to 100%, in particular, the data suggest that the false-positive rate is very low -- under 0.005%. For more information on the accuracy of PCR and Lateral Flow testing, please see this study and our recently published blog. Additionally, we have also published further information on test specificity and sensitivity in our Methods article under section 5.