You asked
What is the actual number of deaths where the sole cause of death was COVID-19 with no underlying medical health issues?
What is the actual number of people that have sadly passed away with COVID-19, but also due to underlying health conditions up until October 2020?
We said
Thank you for your request.
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.
We have been producing the following publication in response to COVID-19: Deaths involving COVID-19, England and Wales. This publication provides a greater insight into the leading underlying causes of death groups for deaths occurring in England and Wales between March and June 2020.
We define a pre-existing condition here 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.
Where only COVID-19 was recorded on the death certificate, or COVID-19 and subsequent conditions caused by COVID-19 were recorded, we refer to these deaths as having "No pre-existing conditions". Of the 50,335 deaths that occurred in March to June 2020 involving COVID-19 in England and Wales, 45,859 (91.1%) had at least one pre-existing condition, while 4,476 (8.9%) had none.
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.
We are no longer publishing monthly COVID-19 deaths with details around the death such as pre-existing conditions or no underlying cause. This is due to the decrease in the number of COVID-19 related deaths. Whilst the number of infections appear to be rising, the number of COVID-19 deaths from July onwards are very small and pose a disclosure risk, making it possible to identify individual records.
We will certainly look to publish this data again should there be a significant rise in deaths, this is required for us to avoid risk of disclosure. We are constantly reassessing this to see how we can continue to publish analysis to inform users.
If you would like to discuss these statistics further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.