You asked
I would like to know how many people have died solely due to Covid-19 in NHS hospitals.
We said
Thank you for your request.
In order to provide analysis on COVID-19 deaths by place of occurrence, such as a hospital, with no underlying health conditions, we would be required to create bespoke analysis. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Public Authorities are not obligated to create information in order to respond to requests. We therefore consider this to be information not held.
However, we expect to publish this when our annual mortality dataset has been finalised. This is provisionally scheduled for release in July 2021.
You may also find the following analysis of interest:
We have produced analysis for provisional data on deaths by place of occurrence for all causes and deaths involving COVID-19. These are deaths that have been recorded as the underlying cause or as a secondary cause. This can be found in the 'Covid-19 – Place of occurrence' table in the 2020 and 2021 datasets: Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional.
We were also producing Deaths involving COVID-19, England and Wales in the response to COVID-19. This publication provides a greater insight into the leading underlying causes of death groups for deaths occurring in England and Wales between March and June 2020.
We define a pre-existing condition here as the last health condition mentioned on the first part of the death certificate when it came before the coronavirus (COVID-19) or was an independent contributory factor in the death, mentioned in part II. Where only COVID-19 was recorded on the death certificate, or COVID-19 and subsequent conditions caused by COVID-19 were recorded, we refer to these deaths as having "No pre-existing conditions".
Of the 50,335 deaths that occurred in March to June 2020 involving COVID-19 in England and Wales, 45,859 (91.1%) had at least one pre-existing condition, while 4,476 (8.9%) had none. COVID-19 deaths where there was no pre-existing condition between March and June 2020 are included below, this can be found on table 5.
- No pre-existing condition: England and Wales – 4476
- No pre-existing condition: England – 4169
- No pre-existing condition: Wales – 294
This publication had been paused in the summer of 2020 due to the decrease in the number of deaths. These figures will now be included in our Deaths registered monthly in England and Wales starting 26 February 2021.
Provisional monthly death registration data for England and Wales, broken down by sex, age and country are available in this monthly publication: Monthly mortality analysis, England and Wales. This publication contains data from July onwards and includes deaths due to COVID-19 and leading causes of death. Leading causes is also available on table 11 and includes figures for the five-year average.
If you would like to discuss these statistics further, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk.