You asked

Can you please provide the total number of deaths in England & Wales, where Covid-19 was the sole cause of death reported or listed on the deceased's death certificate.

Can you please provide this information by date (including a total for 2020 and 2021 to date) from February 2020 to todays date (25/6/2021).

Can you please provide this information in 5 year age group bands.

We said

Thank you for your request.

Our mortality data are derived from the information on death certificates.

We hold the following analysis, which provides leading pre-existing cause of death groups, for deaths occurring in England and Wales, in 2020 and the first quarter of 2021 that were due to COVID-19: Pre-existing conditions of people whose death was recorded with an underlying cause of COVID-19. This dataset can also be found in section 8 of the Monthly mortality analysis bulletin.

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

In case it is of interest, there were a total of 9,400 (0-64: 1,549 / 65 and over: 7,851) deaths in England and Wales 2020 and 6,483 (0-64: 1,560/ 65 and over: 4,923) deaths registered in quarter 1 of 2021 that were due to COVID-19 and were recorded without any pre-existing conditions.

This publication will be updated quarterly, with information for Q2 of 2021 due to be published on 23 July 2021.

COVID-19 deaths involving pre-existing conditions is split by broad age groups between 1-64 and 65+. Unfortunately, we do not hold this data broken down by five-year age groups and date of death as you have requested. To fulfil this request, we would need use 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.

COVID-19 death recording information:

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.

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