FOI Reference: FOI/2022/4271
You asked
Can I please get the statistics on how many people have died directly from COVID-19 in England and Wales? By this I mean, people who died only due to COVID-19 directly, nothing else, no other medical issues, just people who have died directly from COVID-19. I want to know the exact figures from the 1st of February 2020 until the most recent date that records hold up to - with today being Tuesday 14th June 2022.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Health conditions are recorded on the death certificate only if the certifying doctor or coroner believed they made some contribution to the death, direct or indirect. The death certificate does not include all health conditions from which the deceased might have suffered if they were not considered relevant.
The death certificate (Annex A (PDF, 224KB)) used in England and Wales is compatible with that recommended by WHO. It is set out in two parts. Part I gives the condition or sequence of conditions leading directly to death, while Part II gives details of any associated conditions that contributed to the death but are not part of the causal sequence.
We recommend using our pre-existing conditions methodology to answer this question as it removes any conditions caused by the underlying cause of death.
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 also recommend reading our recent blog on this subject: To say only 17,000 people have died from COVID-19 is highly misleading
We hold analysis showing deaths due to COVID-19 with no pre-existing conditions by broad age-band in England and Wales in the following publication: Pre-existing conditions of people who died due to COVID-19, England and Wales. This is published quarterly within the Monthly Mortality Analysis publication:
The next release is scheduled for publication on 25 July 2022 which will include Q2 data for 2022 .
Further breakdowns of this data are available to request via our bespoke analysis services. 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 the HALE Customer services team on Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.