You asked
Please provide the following information:
1) How many people have died of 'involving' COVID-19 since 21 December 2020.
2) How many of those in (1) had a coronavirus vaccine before they died.
3) Why is COVID-19 not a notifiable decease as stated in Section 30 of the coronavirus Act 2020? This seems odd as this is a once in a lifetime deadly pandemic; and this surely means that no thorough investigations (as in laboratory tests) are required into the cause of death and only an assumption and/or PCR test is needed to place CoVid-19 on death certificates! Can you please clarify?
We said
Thank you for your request.
The mortality data published by us are derived from the formal process of death registration. For Scotland and Northern Ireland statistics please contact National Records Scotland and NISRA respectively.
1) Figure 2 of our Deaths registered weekly bulletin shows the number of deaths due to COVID-19 and the number of deaths involving COVID-19 with "due to" referring only to deaths where COVID-19 was recorded as the underlying cause of death and "involving" referring to deaths that had COVID-19 mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, whether as an underlying cause or not.
Please see the 'download data' option at the bottom of Figure 2.
Here are the latest summed totals for COVID-19 from 2020 up to week ending 2 April 2021:
- Deaths involving COVID-19 (underlying or secondary cause): 136,679
2) We do not hold this analysis. Our mortality data is driven by information supplied on death certificates; we would not know if they had been vaccinated unless it was a contributing factor to the cause of death.
However, we do hold vaccination data for England and we are currently developing our analytical plans with an intention to publish analysis on vaccination effectiveness soon. Once we have finalised these plans a publication date will be announced on our Release Calendar.
Additionally, in case it is of interest, you can find the number of deaths involving COVID-19 in table 12 of our Monthly Mortality Analysis, these include figures for deaths involving adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccination. There are currently 0 deaths registered with the aligning ICD codes for this. However, should this change, they will be updated in this table.
3) It is not ONS remit to define what may be considered a notifiable disease. We are only responsible for the coding and analysis of the mortality data.
Our definition of COVID-19 (regardless of whether it was the underlying cause or mentioned elsewhere on the death certificate) includes some cases where the certifying doctor suspected the death involved COVID-19 but was not certain. For example, a doctor may have clinically diagnosed COVID-19 based on symptoms, but this diagnosis may not have been confirmed because no test was available, or the test result was inconclusive.
Should you have any queries regarding PCR testing, please contact: coronavirus-tracker@phe.gov.uk.