People under 18 years old who have died of COVID-19

FOI Ref: FOI/2022/3808

You asked

Please supply the number of people under 18 years old who have died from COVID-19 and had no underlying health conditions for the past two years.

We said

Thank you for your enquiry.

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. More information on the pre-existing conditions methodology is available in the Pre-existing conditions of people who died due to COVID-19, England and Wales dataset

Please find attached a link to a previously published FOI which will answer your enquiry.

Deaths due to COVID-19 in the UK with no pre-existing conditions by age from March 2020 to January 2022.

If this does not meet your needs, we can create a custom output. 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: Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.

If you wish to discuss this further, please contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.