You asked
To demonstrate the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the anti-covid measures, please could you publish graphs showing your flu statistics for this year compared to those for previous years and long-term averages, with statistical variation ranges shown, and update this on a monthly basis going forward?
We said
Thank you for your request.
Please see the following bulletin, which includes provisional figures for influenza in 2020: Deaths due to coronavirus (COVID-19) compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia, England and Wales: deaths occurring between 1 January and 31 August 2020.
This bulletin states that of all death occurrences between January and August 2020, there were 394 deaths due to influenza.
The highest number of deaths due to influenza and pneumonia combined occurred in January 2020, however influenza and pneumonia deaths were below the five-year average (2015 to 2019) in every month. Please see part three of this bulletin, which includes a graph with a monthly comparison of influenza and pneumonia deaths compared to the 5-year average, which you may find useful. Please note, influenza and pneumonia statistics have been combined for this, due to the small number of influenza deaths per month.
Influenza data up to 2019 is also available via the following link to our interactive webservice: NOMIS. Flu figures for 2020 will be also be added to NOMIS when the 2020 death registrations are complete next year, in July 2020.
In order to fulfil your request for graphs with the particular variables you would like, we would need to create bespoke analysis. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Public Authorities are not obligated to create information in order to respond to requests. We therefore consider this analysis to be information not held.