Influenza deaths in children under 16 years 2020 to 2023

FOI REF: FOI-2023-1496

You asked

Can you please supply information regarding flu deaths of children aged 15 and under.

Please provide data for the last 3 years, the last 5 years and an average across the period.

We said

Thank you for your request. 

Our mortality data comes from the information collected at death registration. All the conditions mentioned on the death certificate are coded using the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10). From all of these causes an underlying cause of death is selected using ICD-10 coding rules.   

The underlying cause of death is defined by WHO as:  

a) the disease or injury that initiated the train of events directly leading to death, or
b) the circumstances of the accident or violence that produced the fatal injury  

 The ICD-10 cause codes influenza are J09 to J11. 

The death certificate is not intended to contain all health conditions from which the deceased suffered at the time of death unless they caused or contributed to the death. Therefore, we cannot say with certainty how many of the deceased were healthy or had underlying health conditions.

The associated download 'Influenza deaths in under 16s' contains the number of deaths registered with either an underlying cause or contributory mention of influenza. The table contains the following notes to aid the interpretation of the data.

1. Figures are for deaths registered rather than deaths occurring. For more information see our Impact of registration delays publication.

2. For deaths over 28 days, the Tenth Revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10) has been used to classify cause of death in the publication. The ICD is used to translate diagnoses of diseases and other health problems from words into alphanumeric code to permit easier storage, retrieval and analysis. For deaths registered from 1 January 2022, cause of death is coded to the ICD-10 classification using MUSE 5.8 software. Deaths registered between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021 were coded to the using MUSE 5.5 and previous years were coded to IRIS 4.2.3. For more information click here. 

3. Figures for underlying cause exclude neonatal deaths as it is not possible to identify a single underlying cause for neonatal deaths or stillbirths. More information can be found in section 6 of our User Guide to Infant and Child Mortality Statistics. 

4. The five-year average has been calculated excluding 2020. For more information, see our Understanding excess deaths during a pandemic blog and our How do we measure expected and excess deaths blog.

For further information please contact Health.data@ons.gov.uk.