FOI Ref: FOI/2023/4828
You asked
You released a document in November 2020 which included tables giving death and mortality data for people with learning disabilites: Estimates of coronavirus (COVID-19) related deaths by disability status, England.
The more recent release excludes these tables.
Please can you provide the data that is missing from these tables (7 to 12 of the first release) completed with data for wave 2 and wave 3.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
We are responsible for the production of mortality statistics for England and Wales, this is driven by information collected from death certificates at death registration.
Disability status is not supplied on the death certificate. Therefore, the analysis we produced during the pandemic was possible by conducting complex linkage of our mortality data to self-reported disability data via 2011 census data. We have since produced an updated bulletin: Updated estimates of coronavirus (COVID-19) related deaths by disability status, England: 24 January 2020 to 9 March 2022 (referenced in your request).
We are developing a programme of work drawing on Census 2021 data and the linkage of administrative data sources, amongst others. The aim of this work is to provide estimates for different impairment types to reflect the variety of experiences among disabled people, including learning disability. Our work on this is in its formative stages to update a release using new markers for learning disability. The development of this research is currently being assessed against other priorities.
Therefore, we do not currently hold updated information showing estimates of COVID-19 mortality in people with a learning disability, because we have not yet identified a suitable definition criteria to identify people with a learning disability. The publication covering people with a learning disability used a definition developed by Oxford University during the development of their Q-Covid model, as a first iteration.
In case it is of interest, please see the following report we published, which describes the difficulty of deducing impairment types from administrative health data: Improving disability data to understand the effects of coronavirus (COVID-19) on people with different impairment types.
If you would like to discuss this enquiry further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.