FOI Reference: FOI/2021/3396
You asked
England and Wales Covid-19 deaths (since pandemic began) in under 40's with NO UNDERLYING HEALTH conditions at all?
Winter excess deaths England and Wales 2019/20 was the lowest ever on record, was it not? 10,320 - there has never been such a low amount with the next lowest nearly double at 17,280 in 2013/14, how is this possible and what do you put this down to?
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
ONS publish deaths from COVID-19 with no pre-existing conditions by broad age-bands (0-64 and 65 and over) for England and Wales in our monthly mortality analysis publication. You can access the figures directly here: Pre-existing conditions of people who died due to COVID-19, England and Wales.
We define a pre-existing condition as the last health condition mentioned on the first part of the death certificate when it came before the coronavirus (COVID-19) or was an independent contributory factor in the death, mentioned in part II. Main pre-existing causes are grouped using the ONS Leading Causes of Deaths list and International Classification of Disease version 10 blocks of causes.
Unfortunately, we do not hold analysis showing COVID-19 deaths with no pre-existing conditions for persons aged between Under 40 specifically. 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 in order to respond to requests. We therefore do not hold this information.
However, this may be available to order as a bespoke output. 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 fall outside of the Freedom of Information regime and can be made to: Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.
The latest Excess Winter Mortality figures are available here: Excess winter mortality in England and Wales: 2020 to 2021 (provisional) and 2019 to 2020 (final). You can access the latest reference tables directly here.
The purpose of the excess winter mortality (EWM) measure is to compare the number of deaths that occurred in the winter period (December to March) with the average of the non-winter periods (August to November and April to July); further details of its calculation can be found in the Excess winter mortality in England and Wales QMI.
In 2020, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic led to a large increase of deaths mostly in the non-winter months of April to July. This impacted our measure of EWM because we rely on using the difference between deaths occurring in the winter and the average of non-winter months; specifically, the scale of COVID-19 deaths during non-winter months has fundamentally disturbed the data time series.
To account for this and provide a comparative measure of impact, we have calculated EWD and the EWM index using deaths including and excluding COVID-19 separately in this section of the bulletin; the remainder of the analysis within the bulletin is then based on deaths excluding COVID-19 to allow us to compare the excess deaths with previous years, when COVID-19 did not exist.
In this bulletin, we use the term "including COVID-19" when referring to all cause deaths including deaths that had COVID-19 mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, whether as an underlying cause of death or not. We use the term "excluding COVID-19" to refer to all cause deaths that did not have COVID-19 mentioned on the death certificate.
In the 2020 to 2021 winter period (December 2020 to March 2021), 63,000 excess winter deaths (EWD) occurred in England and Wales (Figure 1). This was 6.1 times higher than the 10,320 EWD observed in 2019 to 2020, the lowest in the data time series.
This increase was driven by the large number of deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) in the non-winter months of 2020 and the winter months of 2021. For comparison, there were 29,290 EWD excluding COVID-19 in 2019 to 2020.
Section 2 of the publication 'an overview of excess winter mortality in England and Wales' provides this explanation.
If you wish to discuss this further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.