FOI Reference: FOI/2021/3417
You asked
- Do you collect data on all-cause mortality according to vaccination status?
- I would like to know Covid and non-Covid deaths broken down by vaccinated and unvaccinated.
- Could you also please outline how you define vaccinated and non-vaccinated. For instance, how would the following people be classified:
dies within 3 days of first dose
-does within 3 days of second dose
We said
Thank you for your request.
We hold data on mortality, and we receive the data on vaccinations from the National Immunisation Management Service (NIMS) who are responsible for the collection of vaccination data.
We link these datasets to people in the Public Health Data Asset (PHDA) in order to publish age-standardised mortality rates by vaccination status in our publication Deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status, England. The PHDA contains people enumerated in the 2011 Census and registered with a GP in 2019. This covers approximately 79% of the population in England aged 10+.
Use of this dataset enables the calculation of more accurate mortality rates by vaccination status, particularly for the unvaccinated, as population estimates are not required to calculate the living population.
The counts of deaths (total, non-COVID and involving COVID-19) by vaccination status from which the age-standardised rates are calculated and published alongside the mortality rates in the accompanying datasets. However, these are deaths of people in the PHDA only rather than for the whole population.
In this publication, we define vaccination status as one of:
- unvaccinated (received no doses)
- vaccinated with one dose only, less than 21 days ago
- vaccinated with one dose only, at least 21 days ago
- vaccinated with two doses, less than 21 days ago
- vaccinated with two doses, at least 21 days ago
The two dose categories were combined in earlier updates where counts of deaths were too low to calculate accurate age-standardised mortality rates. A category "ever vaccinated" was included in our most recent update in some datasets for people who had received at least 1 vaccine from the day the first dose was received (regardless of how many further doses were received).
Booster doses were not included in previous publications, therefore people with a booster dose would be included in the second dose categories but will be included in future updates.
If someone died within 3 days of a first dose, they would be included in the "vaccinated with 1 dose only, less than 21 days ago" category. If someone died within 3 days of a second dose, they would be included in the "vaccinated with 2 doses, less than 21 days ago" category.
If you require any further clarification or would like to discuss your enquiry further please do not hesitate to contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.