FOI REF:FOI-2023-1507
You asked
Can you please provide me with the number of people who died with COVID-19 in the cause of death box on their certificates and not as a comorbidity?
Can you please count deaths between March 2020 and October 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:
a) the disease or injury that initiated the train of events directly leading to death, or
b) the circumstances of the accident or violence that produced the fatal injury
The death certificate (Annex A (PDF, 224KB)) used in England and Wales is compatible with that recommended by WHO. It is set out in two parts. Part I gives the condition or sequence of conditions leading directly to death, while Part II gives details of any associated conditions that contributed to the death but are not part of the causal sequence.
The ICD-10 cause codes used for Coronavirus (COVID-19) are:
U071 – COVID-19, virus identified.
U072 – COVID-19 virus not identified.
U099 – Post-COVID condition, unspecified.
U109 – Multisystem inflammatory syndrome associated with COVID-19, unspecified.
In England and Wales, between 1 March 2020 and 30 September 2023 there were 208,230 deaths involving COVID-19. Of these, COVID-19 was the underlying cause in 173,035 deaths.
COVID-19 was mentioned on Part I of the death certificate in 167,201 deaths, and on Part II of the death certificate in 41,076 deaths. COVID was mentioned on both parts of the death certificate in 47 deaths, which is why these two figures sum to higher than the number of deaths involving COVID.
Please note:
1. Figures are for deaths registered rather than deaths occurring in the period. 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 in the publication. 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 for neonatal deaths or stillbirths. More information can be found in section 6 of our User Guide to Infant and Child Mortality Statistics.
For further information, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.