You asked
Please provide a breakdown of covid deaths by age. Please also explain exactly what is meant by a covid-19 death that tested positive within 28 days and how and why that is classified as a covid-19 death.
We said
Thank you for your request.
The mortality data published by ONS are derived from the formal process of death registration. 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. This differs to the data published on the GOV.UK website which are counts of all causes of death where a positive test for COVID-19 has been confirmed.
We do not have access to data on when the test was conducted as this is not recorded on the death certificate. 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.
Figure 2 of our Deaths registered weekly bulletin shows the number of deaths due to COVID-19 and the number of deaths involving COVID-19 with "due to" referring only to deaths where COVID-19 was recorded as the underlying cause of death and "involving" referring to deaths that had COVID-19 mentioned anywhere on the death certificate, whether as an underlying cause or not.
Please see the weekly deaths dataset for a breakdown of Covid-19 deaths by age, this can be found on the 'Covid-19 – Weekly registrations' table.
If you would like to discuss these statistics further, please contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk.