You asked
Could you let me know how many people have died of COVID-19 who did not have any contributory factors?
We said
Thank you for your request.
The mortality data published by ONS are derived from the formal process of death registration. For Scotland and Northern Ireland statistics please contact National Records Scotland and NISRA respectively.
Deaths from COVID-19 may include cases where the doctor completing the death certificate diagnosed possible cases of COVID-19, for example, where this was based on relevant symptoms but no test for the virus was conducted. Deaths with a positive test are coded using the ICD10 code U0.71 and those with suspected COVID-19 but no test has been conducted are coded with ICD10 U0.72.
ONS have been producing pre-existing conditions of people whose death was recorded with an underlying cause of COVID-19, deaths registered in 2020, this dataset can be found in section 8 of the monthly mortality analysis bulletin. This dataset provides a greater insight into the leading pre-existing cause of death groups, for deaths occurring in England and Wales in 2020 that were due to COVID-19.
Please see 'table 1a, row 28' for deaths where COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause, but had no other pre-existing conditions recorded on the death certificate, England and Wales, 2020. Table 1b represents these figures for England and table 1c figures are for Wales.
This publication will be updated quarterly. COVID-19 deaths involving pre-existing conditions is split by broad age groups between 1-64 and 65+. There was a total of 9400 deaths in England and Wales 2020 that were due to COVID-19 and were recorded without any pre-existing conditions.
We have not yet finalised these statistics for the first quarter of 2021.
If you would like to discuss these statistics further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.