You asked

​Of the 46K or so Covid related deaths so far in UK may I please be told:

(a) How many of those deaths had on the death certificate that Covid was the only cause of death

(b) How many of the 46K or so deaths were in each of the brackets namely 0-20 years old, 21-40 years old, 41-60 years old, 61-80 years old, and finally, over 80

We said

Thank you for your enquiry.

We are responsible for the production of mortality data for England and Wales. This is driven by information collected from the death certificate at death registration. National Records Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) are responsible for statistics pertaining to Scotland and Northern Ireland. They can be contacted at foi@nrscotland.gov.uk and info@nisra.gov.uk respectively.

Please see the following dataset: Deaths registered weekly, England and Wales: Dataset. The 'Weekly registrations' and 'Weekly occurrences' tabs provide deaths where COVID-19 was mentioned on the death certificate, broken down into 5-year age brackets.

We use the term "due to COVID-19" when referring only to deaths where that illness was recorded as the underlying cause of death. This information can be found on a weekly basis in Figure 2 of our Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional publication, which is updated every Tuesday.

We have been producing the following publication in the response to COVID-19: Deaths involving COVID-19, England and Wales. Tables 5, 6a, 6b, and 6c of this publication provide COVID-19 death figures broken down by underlying health condition in England and Wales between March and June 2020. Please also see the following information, showing the number and percentage of deaths without pre-existing health conditions from March to June 2020.

COVID-19 deaths with no underlying health condition

Figures for COVID-19 deaths with no underlying health conditions are available on Table 5, this means where no other underlying condition was listed on the death certificate.

  • No pre-existing condition: England and Wales – 4476
  • No pre-existing condition: England – 4169
  • No pre-existing condition: Wales – 294

We are no longer publishing monthly: Deaths involving COVID-19, England and Wales. This is due to the decrease in the number of COVID-19 related deaths. Therefore, we are unable to provide you with COVID deaths with no underlying for July to November 2020. In order to fulfil this request, we would need to create bespoke analysis for you. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Public Authorities are not obligated to create information in order to respond to requests. We therefore consider this to be information not held.

However, you can find provisional monthly death registration data for England and Wales, broken down by sex, age and country are now 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.

If you would like to discuss these statistics further, please contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.