You asked
FOI/2021/2317
I would be grateful if you could provide the number of deaths from COVID-19 and within 28 days of a positive test split by each month from November 2019 to April 2021 inclusive.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
ONS and PHE COVID-19 deaths data are produced in different ways and have different purposes:
the daily COVID deaths counts reported on the government's COVID-19 dashboard (produced by PHE) shows deaths within 28 days of a first positive laboratory-confirmed test.
ONS weekly death registrations data for England and Wales, relate to the week that ended 11 days prior and are based on the cause of death reported on the death certificate, thereby not restricted to only deaths that showed a positive test.
More information can be found in a blog by Professor John Newton of Public Health England about the complexities of counting COVID-19 deaths and the different methods used.
Doctors are required by law to certify the cause of death 'to the best of their knowledge and belief'. That means they use their medical expertise to decide the cause based on symptoms, physical examination, hospital records, laboratory tests, and all the other information available. If death is certified by a coroner, the Coroner's Court follows legal rules of evidence when deciding the causes of death. It is not necessary for the certifier to be completely sure of their conclusion – they decide based on the best available evidence. So, if a doctor thinks the death involved COVID-19 but is not sure, they can include it, along with words like 'possible' or 'suspected'. We code these differently, so we know what proportion of COVID-19 deaths are only suspected cases – in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) definite COVID-19 has the code U07.1 and suspected COVID-19 has the code U07.2.
For March 2020 to June 2020, you can find a monthly breakdown of U0.71 and U0.72 ICD-10 codes with the Deaths Involving COVID-19 publication, in figure 3 "How many people have died from COVID-19".
From July 2020, you can find a monthly breakdown of U0.71 and U0.72 ICD-10 codes within the Monthly Mortality Analysis publication, in the Definition of COVID-19 paragraph.
From March 2020 to April 2021, of the 123,744 deaths due to COVID-19, 4,012 (3.2%) were classified as "suspected" COVID-19. Including all 139,016 deaths involving COVID-19, "suspected" COVID-19 was recorded on 3.3% (4,589 deaths) of all deaths involving COVID-19 in England and Wales. We use the term "due to COVID-19" when referring only to deaths with an underlying cause of death of COVID-19. When including all deaths that had COVID-19 mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, whether as an underlying cause or not, we use the term "involving COVID-19".