Non-COVID-19-related deaths between March 2020 and September 2023

Dyddiad y datganiad:
21 December 2023

Reference: FOI-2023-1619

You asked

Can you please tell me the number of deaths not involving Coronavirus (COVID-19) that occurred between March 2020 and September 2023?

We said

Thank you for your request.  

Our mortality data comes from the information collected at death registration. All the conditions mentioned on the death certificate are coded using the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10). From all of these causes, an underlying cause of death is selected using ICD-10 coding rules. 

The underlying cause of death is defined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as: 

  • The disease or injury that initiated the train of events directly leading to death, or 

  • The circumstances of the accident or violence that produced the fatal injury. 

The ICD-10 cause codes used for Coronavirus (COVID-19) are: 

  • U07.1 – COVID-19, virus identified. 
  • U07.2 – COVID-19, virus not identified. 
  • U09.9 – Post-COVID condition unspecified. 
  • U10.9 – Multisystem inflammatory syndrome associated with COVID-19, unspecified. 

In England and Wales, between 1 March 2020 and 30 September 2023, there were 1,826,354 deaths occurring which were not involving COVID-19. 

Please note: 

  1. Figures are for deaths occurring rather than deaths registered. For more information, see our Impact of Registration Delays publication. 
  2. For deaths over 28 days, the Tenth Revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10) has been used to classify cause of death. The ICD is used to translate diagnoses of diseases and other health problems from words into alphanumeric code to permit easier storage, retrieval, and analysis. For deaths registered from 1 January 2022, cause of death is coded to the ICD-10 classification using MUSE 5.8 software. Deaths registered between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021 were coded to the using MUSE 5.5 and previous years were coded to IRIS 4.2.3. For more information click here. 
  3. Figures exclude neonatal deaths as it is not possible to identify a single underlying cause of death for neonatal deaths or stillbirths. More information can be found in section 6 of our User Guide to Infant and Child Mortality Statistics.  
  4. Figures for 2020, 2021, and 2022 use finalised data. Figures for 2023 are provisional and so the number of death occurrences will increase as more deaths are registered. 

For further information, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.

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