FOI Ref: FOI/2021/2649
You asked
Please can you provide me with the information on deaths registered where Covid 19 is the only cause of death on the certificate?
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
If someone dies in circumstances involving an accident, violence or suspicious circumstances, the case is referred to a coroner for investigation. A post-mortem examination is carried out and usually an inquest is held. The Coroner's Court hears all the evidence and follows legal rules of evidence when deciding the causes of death. It is extremely unlikely that a coroner would find that someone was involved in a traffic accident, or was the victim of violence, because of having COVID-19 or a positive COVID-19 test – so they would not mention COVID-19 on the death certificate. This applies to any death caused by an accident, violence, poisoning, or other external causes.
Even if in an unusual case a death certificate mentioned both COVID-19 and a traffic accident (or other external causes), the World Health Organisation (WHO) rules for coding deaths mean that the traffic accident would be identified as the underlying cause of death in our data.
You can read in detail about the coding of causes of death and identifying the underlying cause in the ONS User guide to mortality statistics and the WHO International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) instruction manual.
Our mortality data are based on the information collected at death registration. Therefore, the requested information for COVID-19 registered deaths where COVID-19 was the only condition on the death certificate can be found in Table 2 of the following publication: Pre-existing conditions of people who died due to COVID-19, England and Wales - Office for National Statistics. This provides deaths from January 2020 to March 2021 by two age broad groups.
You may also find the following information useful:
You can find weekly deaths including COVID-19 as both due to (underlying cause) and involving (contributory cause) within our Deaths Registered Weekly in England and Wales publication. We publish every Tuesday morning at 09:30.
For 2021, from 2 January 2021 to 16 July 2021 (latest available data) there have been 58,430 deaths involving COVID-19 with 50,996 deaths with COVID-19 as the underlying cause.
2020 data is available in our Deaths due to COVID-19, registered in England and Wales: 2020 - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk) publication. In England there were 69,299 registered deaths with COVID-19 as the underlying cause, and 4,382 in Wales.
For further information, please contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.