FOI request to Office of National Statistics

Release date:
16 December 2021

You asked

Please can you advise on deaths purely from covid with no other underlying causes.

We said

Thank you for your request.
We are responsible for the production of mortality data for England and Wales, this is derived from death certificates in the process of death registration.

For mortality figures where COVID-19 was the sole cause of death, please see: ONS=[Pre-existing conditions of people whose death was recorded with an underlying cause of COVID-19], 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 and the first two quarters of 2021 that were due to COVID-19.

Please see 'table 1a, row 28' (2020) and 'table 1, row 29 (2021)' 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.

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+.

Please see below for death registrations for 2020 and 2021 (provisional) that were due to COVID-19 and were recorded without any pre-existing conditions, England and Wales.
2020: 9400 (0-64: 1549 / 65 and over: 7851)
2021 Q1: 6483 (0-64: 1560/ 65 and over: 4923)
2021 Q2: 346 (0-64: 153/ 65 and over: 193)
2021 Q3: 1142 (0-64: 512/ 65 and over: 630)

If you would like to discuss this query further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.

For England & Wales
Following answers from the above FOI report and then comparing them to the weekly data reported shows the vast difference between deaths caused by COVID-19 alone and deaths mentioned with COVID-19 on the death certificate, dying within 28 days of a positive test.