COVID-19 deaths and hospitalisations for Preston Lancashire

​FOI Ref: FOI/2021/2612

You asked

1) Under the freedom of information act could you send me the total number of deaths 'due to COVID 19' as well as the deaths 'with COVID-19' in Preston Lancashire UK for 2020?

2) Also, could you send me the total number of hospitalisations (from all causes) in Preston Lancashire UK from the year of 2010 up to the year of 2020.

3) Could you send me the total number of deaths (from all causes) in Preston Lancashire UK from the year 2010 till the year of 2020.

We said

1.

Provisional numbers of deaths involving COVID-19 registered in 2021 and 2020 are available by local authority in our Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales publication. The dataset can be found via the following link: Death registrations and occurrences by local authority and health board. Comparable data for the period 2015 to 2019 can be found here.

The following analysis provides deaths 'due to' COVID-19 by local authority: Monthly mortality analysis, England and Wales.

You may also be interested in this publication, as it also provides the numbers and percentages of deaths where COVID-19 was recorded as the sole condition on the death certificate and COVID-19 deaths by main pre-existing condition, for England and Wales. This information is available via the following link: Pre-existing conditions of people who have died from COVID-19. Please note, we do not publish this information by local authority because data at such a granular level are potentially disclosive. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) renders it an offence to disclose information held by the Statistics Board for statistical purposes that would identify an individual or a body corporate. More information can be found in our disclosure control policy.

We also publish COVID-19-related deaths for England and Wales in Figure 2 of our weekly deaths publication. This includes deaths 'due to' COVID-19 (where it was recorded as the underlying cause of death) and deaths 'involving' COVID-19 (where it was mentioned anywhere on the death certificate).  The dataset is available here.  Please be aware that deaths 'due to' COVID means it was recorded as the underlying cause of death, but contributory causes could still have been mentioned. We publish a separate dataset showing the number of deaths where it was the underlying and sole condition in the monthly publication, as explained in previous paragraph.

2.

Unfortunately, we do not hold information regarding Hospital Episode Statistics (HES). NHS Digital may be better placed to answer this query.  Numbers of COVID-19 patients admitted to hospital are produced by Public Health England and available via the COVID-19 dashboard.

3.

We are responsible for mortality statistics for England and Wales. This is based on the information collected at death registration. Death registrations from all causes of death, for Preston Local Authority, are shown in the table below.

1.       Figures are for persons usually resident in Preston local authority (Geographic area code E07000123), based on the May 2021 National Statistics Postcode Lookup (NSPL) boundaries.        

2.       Figures are based on deaths registered between 2010 and 2020. Figures only include deaths that were registered by 31 Dec 2020, so figures for 2020 may be an underestimate due to registration delays.  Further information on registration delays is available here.      

If you have any questions regarding the above statistics, please contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.