You asked

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) their graph, global circulation of influenza viruses generated on 20/11/2020, shows influenza has disappeared from the face of the earth. Can you please confirm this with any data/information.

We said

Thank you for your request.

We are not responsible for the data published by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and therefore cannot comment on the presentation of their data.

We are responsible for producing mortality statistics for England and Wales, driven by information collected from the death certificate at death registration.

We produce provisional monthly death registration data for England and Wales, broken down by sex, age and country, available via the following publication: Monthly mortality analysis, England and Wales. This publication contains data from July to October 2020.

Please see Point 4: Leading Causes of this publication, which provides a graph showing deaths from influenza and pneumonia combined compared to the 5-year average. Please also see Table 11 of the following dataset, which accompanies this bulletin: Monthly Mortality Analysis dataset. This provides deaths from influenza and pneumonia compared to the 5-year average in a table format.

Please note, in this publication and dataset, influenza deaths are not shown separately. Figures for both 'Influenza and Pneumonia' are grouped together (J09 – J18). Influenza and pneumonia deaths were ranked 7th in the top 10 leading causes of death in October 2020 and 8th in November 2020.

Additionally, weekly deaths from influenza and pneumonia combined are available in our Weekly Deaths Bulletin. The downloadable data file under Figure 2 in this publication provides deaths involving influenza and pneumonia and deaths caused by influenza and pneumonia.

We have produced the following bulletin comparing deaths from COVID-19 to deaths from influenza and pneumonia, which may be of use to you: Deaths from COVID-19 compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia, January to August 2020.

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