You asked
The Office for National Statistics classes deaths from COVID-19 and with COVID-19 as two different things in the Monthly Mortality Analysis bulletin.
The official number of COVID-19 deaths is recorded as COVID-19/coronavirus being mentioned anywhere on the death certificate but not necessarily caused by coronavirus. For this reason, the mortality analysis for England does not have as many COVID-19 deaths mentioned as the official number, released by the PM at the start of the lock-down in his daily briefing.
Could you supply any documents, emails or notes that were used to form the decision to class an official COVID-19 death as mentioned on the death certificate and not COVID-19 being the cause of death.
Public Health England has suggested you would be better suited to provide the above, please see the response to my previous FOI.
We said
Thank you for your request.
We publish a count of all mentions of the coronavirus (COVID-19) on the death certificate in our Weekly deaths publication to ensure that we were and are capturing all deaths that involved COVID-19. Any health condition which is mentioned on the death certificate has contributed to the cause of death, whether it was the underlying cause or not. Therefore, if we counted only deaths where COVID-19 was the underlying cause, we would underestimate the mortality impact of the pandemic.
Furthermore, as COVID-19 is a new disease, it was unknown at the beginning of the pandemic how it would manifest clinically and what its relationship would be to other health conditions in the context of establishing the cause of death. Therefore, it was considered more informative to ensure that deaths with any mention of COVID-19 were counted.
We do not hold documents, emails or notes used to form the decision to class an "official COVID-19 death" as mentioned on the death certificate and not COVID-19 being the cause of death, as no such decision was made. Whenever COVID-19 is mentioned on the death certificate, it contributed to the cause of death. Our distinction is between deaths "due to COVID-19", as the underlying cause, and deaths "involving COVID-19", as a contributory cause. In each of our publications we make clear which of these categories is being used for the analysis.
In the following publication, Monthly mortality analysis, deaths with an underlying cause of COVID-19 are referred to as "due to COVID-19". This is different from deaths "involving COVID-19", which includes deaths that had COVID-19 mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, whether as underlying cause or a contributory factor in the death.