FOI Ref: FOI/2022/3543
You asked
Could you please send me the amount of people who died in 2020 of COVID only, with no underlying conditions.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
We are responsible for the production of mortality data for England and Wales, this is derived from death certificates in the process of death registration.
The medical certificate of cause of death has two parts, Part 1 contains the sequence of health conditions or events leading directly to death, while Part 2 can contain other health conditions that contributed to the death but were not part of the direct sequence. Deaths due to COVID-19 usually have COVID-19 mentioned in Part 1 and may have consequences of COVID-19, such as pneumonia, mentioned in lines above. The presence of conditions listed as consequences of COVID-19 are not underlying conditions and are not counted in our method to describe pre-existing conditions mentioned in deaths due to COVID-19.
We define pre-existing conditions as those mentioned in Part 2 of the medical certificate of cause of death. If COVID-19 is mentioned in Part 1 on lines above other conditions also mentioned in Part 1, the last condition mentioned in Part 1 is also considered a pre-existing condition. We don't know exactly how many people who died from COVID-19 had no pre-existing health conditions, only how many did not have a pre-existing condition mentioned on the death certificate. A contributor to the cause of death is expected to have increased the likelihood of death, but this does not mean that the death would have been avoided in its absence.
We would also recommend reading our recent blog on this subject.
We hold the following analysis: Pre-existing conditions of people whose death was recorded with an underlying cause of COVID-19, this dataset can be found in section 8 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 and the first three quarters of 2021 that were due to COVID-19. We do not hold COVID-19 data for 2019, the first death involving COVID-19 in England and Wales was registered in March 2020.
Please see 'table 1a, row 30' (2020 dataset) for deaths where COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause, but had no other pre-existing conditions recorded on the death certificate, England and Wales. Table 1b represents these figures for England and table 1c figures are for Wales.
This publication will be updated quarterly. COVID-19 deaths involving pre-existing conditions is split by broad age groups between 1-64 and 65+.
We have also provided the following figures from this publication, which show death registrations for 2020 that were due to COVID-19 and were recorded without any pre-existing conditions, England and Wales:
2020: 9432 (0-64: 1557 / 65 and over: 7875)
If you would like to discuss this query further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.