You asked
Please give me the total number of Covid-19 deaths without pre-existing conditions under the age of 65 from March 2020 to February 2021.
We said
Thank you for your request.
We are responsible for the production of mortality data for England and Wales, this is driven by information collected from the death certificate at death registration. For Scotland and Northern Ireland statistics please contact National Records Scotland and NISRA respectively.
We have been producing Pre-existing conditions of people whose death was recorded with an underlying cause of COVID-19, deaths registered in 2020, this dataset can be found in section 7 of the Monthly mortality analysis bulletin. This dataset provides a greater insight into the leading underlying causes of death groups for deaths occurring in England and Wales in 2020 and will be updated quarterly.
Please see 'table 1a, row 28' for quarterly deaths where COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause, but had no other pre-existing conditions recorded on the death certificate. COVID-19 deaths involving pre-existing conditions are split by broad age groups between 1-64 and 65+.
This dataset provides information from January to December 2020. This publication will be updated in the next quarter with the requested data for January and February of 2021. As such, the information you have requested is considered exempt under Section 22(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, whereby information is exempt from release if there is a view to publish the information in the future. Furthermore, as a central government department and producer of official statistics, we need to have the freedom to be able to determine our own publication timetables. This is to allow us to deal with the necessary preparation, administration and context of publications. It would be unreasonable to consider disclosure when to do so would undermine our functions.
This exemption is subject to a public interest test. We recognise the desirability of information being freely available and this is considered by ONS when publication schedules are set in accordance with the Code of Practice for Statistics. The need for timely data must be balanced against the practicalities of applying statistical skill and judgement to produce the high quality, assured data needed to inform decision-making. If this balance is incorrectly applied, then we run the risk of decisions being based on inaccurate data which is arguably not in the public interest. This will have an impact on public trust in official statistics in a time when accuracy of official statistics is more important to the public than ever before.
If you would like to discuss these statistics further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.