FOI Reference: FOI/2021/3398
You asked
I would like to request the following information on the back of the recent data that was published covering dates between January 2nd 2021 and September 24th 2021?
1) Request 1
You have recently released data showing that 18,971 people have died within 21 days of receiving a first dose of covid-19 vaccine that you have categorised as non covid-19 deaths. Please can you break this number down into age categories Under 18 18-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 80+
Please also categorise yes or no if they had pre existing health conditions.
2) Request 2
You have recently released data showing that 12,344 people have died within 21 days of receiving a second dose of covid-19 vaccine that you have categorised as non covid-19 deaths. Please can you break this number down into age categories Under 18 18-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 80+
Please also categorise yes or no if they had pre existing health conditions in 2 separate columns
3) Request 3
You have recently released data showing that 4,413 people have died within 21 days of receiving a first dose of covid-19 vaccine that you have categorised as "deaths involving covid-19" Please can you break this number down into age categories Under 18 18-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 80+
Please also categorise yes or no if they had pre existing health conditions in 2 separate columns.
4) Request 4
You have recently released data showing that 196 people have died within 21 days of receiving a second dose of covid-19 vaccine that you have categorised as "deaths involving covid-19" Please can you break this number down into age categories Under 18 18-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 80+
Please also categorise yes or no if they had pre existing health conditions in 2 separate columns.
5) Request 5
You have recently released data showing that 80,036 people have died 21 days or more after receiving a first dose of covid-19 vaccine that you have categorised as "non covid-19 deaths"
Please can you break this number down into age categories Under 18 18-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 80+
Please also categorise yes or no if they had pre existing health conditions in 2 separate columns.
6) Request 6
You have recently released data showing that 7,705 people have died 21 days or more after receiving a first dose of covid-19 vaccine that you have categorised as "deaths involving covid-19"
Please can you break this number down into age categories Under 18 18-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 80+
We said
Thank you for your request for COVID-19 deaths broken down by age group (Under 18, 18-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, 80+) and whether they had they a pre-existing condition and the numbers of non-COVID-19 deaths and deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status (within 21 days of 1st / 2nd dose, 21 days or more after 1st dose), published in our Deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status, England publication on 1 November.
The numbers quoted in the request are from Table 6 and are for the whole population in England aged 10+ for deaths occurring between 2 January and 24 September 2021. It should be noted that the numbers quoted in the request as "non COVID-19 deaths" are in fact total deaths, therefore total deaths have been provided to answer this request, but the non-COVID-19 deaths can be calculated from the total deaths by taking away the number of deaths involving COVID-19.
Unfortunately, we would be unable to provide you with the data broken down by health condition. We do not hold data on whether someone has a health condition or not, we construct these variables using a particular definition from the Hospital Episode Statistics and GP extraction service datasets. To fulfil this request, we would need use a high level of statistical skill and judgement including complex data to link all mortality data to the GP extraction service data and Hospital Episode Statistics datasets and determine people with a pre-existing condition in order to create a bespoke analysis or table. 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 to be information not held.
As the data requested is a breakdown of the numbers in Table 6, the following constraints were applied for consistency with the published data:
- The numbers of deaths in Table 6 were included for the purposes of comparison to the numbers of deaths in the Public Health Data Asset dataset, which is used to calculate the mortality rates using a known living population. Therefore, deaths of people aged under 10 were not included as people aged under 10 are not in the PHDA and are unlikely to be vaccinated.
- Deaths of people with erroneous vaccination status data are not included as they cannot be assigned to a vaccination status group; this corresponds to 35 deaths.
- Data is for deaths that were registered by the 6 October 2021, as this was the latest data used for the publication.
The data requested is provided in the accompanying spreadsheet named "Covid 19 deaths broken down by age and vaccination status between January to September 2021 in England"
The counts of deaths for the 'Under 18' group, which covers ages 10-17, have been combined with those for the 18-29 age group to protect the confidentiality of the individuals. This is consistent with the disclosure control methodology used for deaths. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) which renders it an offence to disclose information held by the Statistics Board for statistical purposes that would identify an individual or a body corporate. As we are prohibited by law from publishing statistics in which individual businesses or persons can be identified, we find that Section 44 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies. Section 44 is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.
If you require any further assistance on the above data set, please feel free to contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk directly.