You asked
Please provide:
The number of deaths in Scotland each month in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
The number of deaths recorded as COVID-19 in each month from January 2020 to date.
The number of deaths recorded as COVID-19 alone in each month from January 2020 to date.
We said
Thank you for your request.
We are responsible for producing mortality statistics for England and Wales, this is driven by information collected from the death certificate at death registration. Therefore, unfortunately, we do not hold the information you have requested. National Records Scotland (NRS) are responsible for statistics pertaining to Scotland. They can be contacted at foi@nrscotland.gov.uk.
However, please see the following information we have available for England and Wales, in case this is of interest.
Please see our datasets: Deaths registered monthly in England and Wales. These datasets contain monthly mortality statistics from 2006 – 2020 current (provisional).
We have also been producing Deaths involving COVID-19, England and Wales in the response to COVID-19. This publication provides a greater insight into the leading underlying causes of death groups for deaths occurring in England and Wales between March and June 2020.
We define a pre-existing condition here as the last health condition mentioned on the first part of the death certificate when it came before the coronavirus (COVID-19), or was an independent contributory factor in the death, mentioned in part II. Where only COVID-19 was recorded on the death certificate, or COVID-19 and subsequent conditions caused by COVID-19 were recorded, we refer to these deaths as having "No pre-existing conditions". Of the 50,335 deaths that occurred in March to June 2020 involving COVID-19 in England and Wales, 45,859 (91.1%) had at least one pre-existing condition, while 4,476 (8.9%) had none. COVID-19 deaths where there was no pre-existing condition between March and June 2020 are included below, this can be found on table 5.
No pre-existing condition: England and Wales – 4,476
No pre-existing condition: England – 4,169
No pre-existing condition: Wales – 294
Provisional monthly death registration data for England and Wales, broken down by sex, age and country are now available in this monthly publication: Monthly mortality analysis, England and Wales. This publication contains data from July onwards and includes deaths due to COVID-19 and leading causes of death. Leading causes is also available in table 11 and includes figures for the five-year average.
Alternatively, we also publish Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional which include weekly death registrations involving COVID-19. These include deaths where COVID-19 was mentioned as a contributing factor, figures can be found on the 'Covid-19 – Weekly registrations' table. These figures can be used to total up the number of death registrations in each month.