Detailed breakdown of daily COVID-19 deaths by vaccination status, age, and sex

​FOI Ref: FOI/2021/2901

You asked

Please supply a much more detailed breakdown of the daily COVID-19 deaths across the UK.

Could you please breakdown the daily COVID-19 deaths into how many are vaccinated as opposed to how many are non-vaccinated.

If you could also breakdown these into age groups and groups of those individuals with underlining health issues.

We said

Thank you for your enquiry requesting daily deaths involving COVID-19 by age, underlying health condition and vaccination status.

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.

Unfortunately, we do not hold analysis showing a daily breakdown of COVID-19 deaths by vaccination status and also by pre-existing condition and age. To fulfil this request, we would need to create complex bespoke analysis, which we are not obligated to do under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

For context, the reason we have not undertaken this analysis and are, unfortunately, not in a position to offer this as a bespoke output is because the small level of detail involved in this analysis would be disclosive. 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 individuals. Therefore, even if we were to create this, we would be unable to release this information to you.

However, you may find the following information related to your request helpful:

We have published the following release Deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status, England: deaths occurring between 2 January and 2 July 2021. Table 1 of this publication shows a count of deaths involving COVID-19 and percentage of all deaths by vaccination status, England, deaths occurring between 2 January and 2 July 2021.

Weekly age adjusted rates can be found in Figure 1 of this publication. Counts and rates are included in this dataset.

We have also undertaken analysis of the ages of the 256 'Breakthrough deaths', in tables 1 and 2 of the publication.

'Breakthrough cases' are where infection has occurred in someone who is fully vaccinated. We define a 'breakthrough death' as a death involving coronavirus (COVID-19) that occurred in someone who had received both vaccine doses and had a first positive PCR test at least 14 days after the second vaccination dose. In total, there were 256 breakthrough deaths between 2 January and 2 July 2021 (Table 2). Please see the following table for this information:

This is the latest data we hold on this topic. However, we are planning a future publication as we obtain more data. The publication date will be announced on our Release Calendar.

To note, also, deaths involving or due to COVID-19 are published weekly without vaccination status as part of our Deaths Registered Weekly in England and Wales publication. This publication also holds headline weekly figures for COVID-19 deaths in Scotland and Northern Ireland.