Figures for deaths occurring in England only, including non-residents and methodology on how the 5-year average is calculated

You asked

Please provide the following information:

1. Weekly death figures from all causes, specific to England only (not including deaths in Wales), from and including the week commencing 16 March 2020, to and including the week commencing 25 May 2020. I note that the death by region registered figures exclude non-residents, so I'd like figures which include non-resident deaths if possible. To be clear, I'm asking for figures which include deaths that have occurred (not necessarily those that have been registered) in England only, if possible.

1. I'd also like to request the methodology on how the 5-year average deaths figure is calculated for England too, please.

We said

Thank you for your request.

Provisional numbers of deaths by week of occurrence are available in the Death registrations and occurrences by local authority publication. The worksheet you will need to calculate the requested information is named 'Occurrences: Pivot Table'.

These figures are broken down by local authority, so the numbers for English local authorities will need to be added together to get the total figure for England. Welsh local authorities can be unselected from the list using the drop-down menu on the pivot table, labelled 'Area Name'.

Under 'week number' you can add the weeks of the year that you are interested in. The weeks you are looking for are weeks 11, 12, and 13.

This will provide the figures for deaths that have occurred in England for the weeks you are interested in.

Please note, these figures do not include deaths of non-residents. Unfortunately, we would be unable to provide deaths of non-residents by place of occurrence for you in answer to your request. In order to do so, we would need use a high level of statistical skill and judgement, involving writing code and doing a special extract of data, in order to create bespoke analysis for you. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Public Authorities are not obligated to create information in order to respond to requests. We therefore consider this to be information not held.

You could, however, identify the number of death registrations of non-residents yourself by comparing weekly death registrations by Local Authority to the total weekly registrations for England and Wales, which may be of interest to you.

The five-year average number of weekly deaths are calculated by adding together the deaths for each week over the specified five-year period and dividing by five to get the average.