COVID-19 deaths in the UK by vaccination status, age and pre-existing conditions

​FOI Ref: FOI/2022/3555

You asked

Please supply the following for the date range from January 2020 to present:

1. Average age of all cause death in the UK.

2. Average age of death in the UK from or with Covid-19.

3. How many of the Covid-19 deaths had 1 or more pre existing condition.

4. How many of the Covid-19 deaths had at least 1 dose of a vaccine.

5. How many of the Covid -19 deaths had no pre existing health conditions.

6. How many of the Covid 19 deaths had not had any dose of the vaccine.

7. How many children under 11 have died from Covid 19.

8. How many covid 19 deaths under 11 had pre existing conditions.

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.

As part of a collaboration, we do publish some headline UK data such as Average age at death, by sex, UK - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk). The latest publication looks at 2016 to 2018.

If this does not meet your needs, we can create a custom output. Special extracts and tabulations of mortality data for England and Wales are available to order (subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs, where appropriate). Such enquiries would fall outside of the Freedom of Information regime and should be made to: Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.

Average age of COVID-19 deaths in England and Wales

We hold the following analysis which provides monthly average age of death for deaths due to or involving COVID-19 in England and Wales: Average age of death of people whose death was due to or involved COVID-19.

Pre-existing conditions of people who died due to COVID-19 in England and Wales

The medical certificate of cause of death has two parts, Part 1 contains the sequence of health conditions or events leading directly to death, while Part 2 can contain other health conditions that contributed to the death but were not part of the direct sequence. Deaths due to COVID-19 usually have COVID-19 mentioned in Part 1 and may have consequences of COVID-19, such as pneumonia, mentioned in lines above. The presence of conditions listed as consequences of COVID-19 are not underlying conditions and are not counted in our method to describe pre-existing conditions mentioned in deaths due to COVID-19.

We define pre-existing conditions as those mentioned in Part 2 of the medical certificate of cause of death. If COVID-19 is mentioned in Part 1 on lines above other conditions also mentioned in Part 1, the last condition mentioned in Part 1 is also considered a pre-existing condition. We don't know exactly how many people who died from COVID-19 had no pre-existing health conditions, only how many did not have a pre-existing condition mentioned on the death certificate. A contributor to the cause of death is expected to have increased the likelihood of death, but this does not mean that the death would have been avoided in its absence.

We would recommend reading our recent blog on this subject: To say only 17,000 people have died from COVID-19 is highly misleading | National Statistical (ons.gov.uk).

We do publish Pre-existing conditions of people who died due to COVID-19, England and Wales using broad age bands which will contain deaths with no pre-existing conditions and up to 5 or more pre-existing conditions. Data is available quarterly for 2020 and 2021.

Deaths by vaccination status

We hold the following analysis "Deaths involving COVID-19 by Vaccination Status, England: deaths occurring between 2 January and 31 October 2021". We use 21 days after vaccination as this is when the vaccine is deemed to be effective. Please note this publication does not include deaths attributed to an adverse reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine.

Table 8 of this publication whole age period number of deaths and age standardised mortality rates for England by vaccination status.

The data are for England only, as vaccinations data for Wales is not yet available to be linked to the mortality dataset and the Public Health Data Asset covers England only. Therefore, we consider data for Wales as information not held.

Our next publication will include data for November and December which will be published on 4 February 2022.

COVID-19 deaths registered for under 11 years old

Using the Single year of age and average age of death of people whose death was due to or involved COVID-19 publication, there have been 27 deaths involving COVID-19 registered from March 2020 to December 2021 for England and Wales. Of these 27 registered deaths, 20 have COVID-19 registered as the underlying cause of death.

We do publish Pre-existing conditions of people who died due to COVID-19, England and Wales using broad age bands which will contain deaths with no pre-existing conditions and up to 5 or more pre-existing conditions. Data is available quarterly for 2020 and 2021.

Unfortunately, we are unable to offer disaggregation of pre-existing conditions for COVID-19 deaths aged under 11 due to the small number of deaths as it is considered personal information. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) renders it an offence to disclose information held by the Statistics Board for statistical purposes that would identify an individual or a body corporate. As we are prohibited by law from publishing statistics in which individuals can be identified, we find that Section 44 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies. Section 44 is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.