You asked
Can you please confirm how many of the 114,851 Covid-19 deaths reported to 10/02/21 where Covid-19 only reported on the death certificate.
We said
Thank you for your request.
In order to provide the number of deaths registered on 10/02/2021 with COVID-19 as the only cause of death, we would be required to create bespoke analysis. 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.
However, we have been producing the following publication: Pre-existing conditions of people whose death was recorded with an underlying cause of COVID-19, deaths registered in 2020. This dataset can be found in section 7 of the Monthly mortality analysis bulletin.
This dataset provides a greater insight into the leading pre-existing cause of death groups, for deaths occurring in England and Wales in 2020 that were due to COVID-19. This will be updated quarterly. COVID-19 deaths involving pre-existing conditions is split by broad age groups between 1-64 and 65+.
Table 1a, row 28 of this publication provides the number of deaths where COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause, but had no other pre-existing conditions recorded on the death certificate.
There were a total of 9,400 deaths in 2020 that were due to COVID-19 and were recorded without any pre-existing conditions.
Also, in case it is of interest, 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 summed totals for COVID-19 in 2020 up to week ending 1st January 2021:
- Deaths involving COVID-19 (underlying or secondary cause): 80,830
- Deaths due to COVID-19 (underlying cause): 73,444
Our latest summed totals are available up to 19 February 2021:
- Deaths involving COVID-19 (underlying or secondary cause): 128,077
- Deaths due to COVID-19 (underlying cause): 115,574
If you would like to discuss these statistics further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.