Between 1953 and 2021, the death rate of the United Kingdom fluctuated between a high of 12.2 deaths per 1,000 people in 1962 and a low of 8.7 in 2011. From 2011 onwards, the death rate creeped up slightly and, in 2020, reached 10.3 deaths per 1,000 people. In 2021, the most recent year provided here, the death rate was ten, a decline from 2020 but still higher than in almost every year in the twenty-first century. The recent spike in the death rate corresponds to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, with the first cases recorded in early 2020. Most deaths since 1918 in 2020 In 2020, there were 689,629 deaths in the United Kingdom, the highest in more than a century. Although there were fewer deaths in 2021, at 667,479, this was still far higher than in recent years. When looking at the weekly deaths in England and Wales for this time period, two periods stand out for reporting far more deaths than usual. The first period was between weeks 13 and 22 of 2020, which saw two weeks in late April report more than 20,000 deaths. Excess deaths for the week ending April 17, 2020, were 11,854, and 11,539 for the following week. Another wave of deaths occurred in January 2021, when there were more than 18,000 deaths per week between weeks three and five of that year. Improvements to life expectancy slowing Between 2020 and 2022, life expectancy in the United Kingdom was approximately 82.57 years for women and 78.57 years for men. Compared with life expectancy in 1980/82 this marked an increase of around six years for women and almost eight years for men. Despite these long-term developments, improvements to life expectancy have been slowing in recent years, and have declined since 2017/19. As of 2022, the country with the highest life expectancy in the World was Japan, which was 84.5 years, followed by South Korea, at 83.6 years.

Based on a comparison of coronavirus deaths in 210 countries relative to their population, Peru had the most losses to COVID-19 up until July 13, 2022. As of the same date, the virus had infected over 557.8 million people worldwide, and the number of deaths had totaled more than 6.3 million. Note, however, that COVID-19 test rates can vary per country. Additionally, big differences show up between countries when combining the number of deaths against confirmed COVID-19 cases. The source seemingly does not differentiate between "the Wuhan strain" (2019-nCOV) of COVID-19, "the Kent mutation" (B.1.1.7) that appeared in the UK in late 2020, the 2021 Delta variant (B.1.617.2) from India or the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) from South Africa.

The difficulties of death figures

This table aims to provide a complete picture on the topic, but it very much relies on data that has become more difficult to compare. As the coronavirus pandemic developed across the world, countries already used different methods to count fatalities, and they sometimes changed them during the course of the pandemic. On April 16, for example, the Chinese city of Wuhan added a 50 percent increase in their death figures to account for community deaths. These deaths occurred outside of hospitals and went unaccounted for so far. The state of New York did something similar two days before, revising their figures with 3,700 new deaths as they started to include “assumed” coronavirus victims. The United Kingdom started counting deaths in care homes and private households on April 29, adjusting their number with about 5,000 new deaths (which were corrected lowered again by the same amount on August 18). This makes an already difficult comparison even more difficult. Belgium, for example, counts suspected coronavirus deaths in their figures, whereas other countries have not done that (yet). This means two things. First, it could have a big impact on both current as well as future figures. On April 16 already, UK health experts stated that if their numbers were corrected for community deaths like in Wuhan, the UK number would change from 205 to “above 300”. This is exactly what happened two weeks later. Second, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly which countries already have “revised” numbers (like Belgium, Wuhan or New York) and which ones do not. One work-around could be to look at (freely accessible) timelines that track the reported daily increase of deaths in certain countries. Several of these are available on our platform, such as for Belgium, Italy and Sweden. A sudden large increase might be an indicator that the domestic sources changed their methodology.

Where are these numbers coming from?

The numbers shown here were collected by Johns Hopkins University, a source that manually checks the data with domestic health authorities. For the majority of countries, this is from national authorities. In some cases, like China, the United States, Canada or Australia, city reports or other various state authorities were consulted. In this statistic, these separately reported numbers were put together. For more information or other freely accessible content, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

COVID-19 rate of death, or the known deaths divided by confirmed cases, was over ten percent in Yemen, the only country that has 1,000 or more cases. This according to a calculation that combines coronavirus stats on both deaths and registered cases for 221 different countries. Note that death rates are not the same as the chance of dying from an infection or the number of deaths based on an at-risk population. By April 26, 2022, the virus had infected over 510.2 million people worldwide, and led to a loss of 6.2 million. The source seemingly does not differentiate between "the Wuhan strain" (2019-nCOV) of COVID-19, "the Kent mutation" (B.1.1.7) that appeared in the UK in late 2020, the 2021 Delta variant (B.1.617.2) from India or the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) from South Africa.

Where are these numbers coming from?

The numbers shown here were collected by Johns Hopkins University, a source that manually checks the data with domestic health authorities. For the majority of countries, this is from national authorities. In some cases, like China, the United States, Canada or Australia, city reports or other various state authorities were consulted. In this statistic, these separately reported numbers were put together. Note that Statista aims to also provide domestic source material for a more complete picture, and not to just look at one particular source. Examples are these statistics on the confirmed coronavirus cases in Russia or the COVID-19 cases in Italy, both of which are from domestic sources. For more information or other freely accessible content, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

A word on the flaws of numbers like this

People are right to ask whether these numbers are at all representative or not for several reasons. First, countries worldwide decide differently on who gets tested for the virus, meaning that comparing case numbers or death rates could to some extent be misleading. Germany, for example, started testing relatively early once the country’s first case was confirmed in Bavaria in January 2020, whereas Italy tests for the coronavirus postmortem. Second, not all people go to see (or can see, due to testing capacity) a doctor when they have mild symptoms. Countries like Norway and the Netherlands, for example, recommend people with non-severe symptoms to just stay at home. This means not all cases are known all the time, which could significantly alter the death rate as it is presented here. Third and finally, numbers like this change very frequently depending on how the pandemic spreads or the national healthcare capacity. It is therefore recommended to look at other (freely accessible) content that dives more into specifics, such as the coronavirus testing capacity in India or the number of hospital beds in the UK. Only with additional pieces of information can you get the full picture, something that this statistic in its current state simply cannot provide.

Annual data on death registrations by area of usual residence in the UK. Summary tables including age-standardised mortality rates.

The infant mortality rate in the United Kingdom, for children under the age of one (twelve months), was 31.7 deaths per thousand births in 1950. Approximately 3.2 percent of children born in 1950 did not survive past their first birthday. Over the course of the next 70 years, this number has dropped significantly. It amounted to just four deaths per thousand births in the period between 2015 and 2020, the lowest figure recorded.

There were 11,607 deaths registered in England and Wales for the week ending February 21, 2025, compared with 12,365 in the previous week. During this time period, the two weeks with the highest number of weekly deaths were in April 2020, with the week ending April 17, 2020, having 22,351 deaths, and the following week 21,997 deaths, a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Death and life expectancy As of 2022, the life expectancy for women in the UK was just over 82.5 years, and almost 78.6 years for men. Compared with 1765, when average life expectancy was under 39 years, this is a huge improvement in historical terms. Even in the more recent past, life expectancy was less than 47 years at the start of the 20th Century, and was under 70 as recently as the 1950s. Despite these significant developments in the long-term, improvements in life expectancy stalled between 2009/11 and 2015/17, and have even gone in decline since 2020. Between 2020 and 2022, for example, life expectancy at birth fell by 23 weeks for females, and 37 weeks for males.2. COVID-19 in the UK The first cases of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom were recorded on January 31, 2020, but it was not until a month later that cases began to rise exponentially. By March 5 of this year there were more than 100 cases, rising to 1,000 days later and passing 10,000 cumulative cases by March 26. At the height of the pandemic in late April and early May, there were around six thousand new cases being recorded daily. As of January 2023, there were more than 24.2 million confirmed cumulative cases of COVID-19 recorded in the United Kingdom, resulting in 202,156 deaths.

Annual UK and constituent country figures for births, deaths, marriages, divorces, civil partnerships and civil partnership dissolutions.

Infant mortality is defined as the number of babies dying before the age of one for every 1,000 live births. Infant mortality is a measure of the longer term consequences of perinatal events and is particularly important for monitoring outcomes for high risk groups such as very preterm babies and growth restricted babies. Legacy unique identifier: P01743

In 2023, the age-specific death rate for men aged 90 or over in England and Wales was 248.1 per one thousand population, and 215.1 for women. Except for infants that were under the age of one, younger age groups had the lowest death rate, with the death rate getting progressively higher in older age groups.

Provisional counts of the number of deaths registered in England and Wales, by age, sex, region and Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), in the latest weeks for which data are available.

Age-standardised mortality rates for deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19), non-COVID-19 deaths and all deaths by vaccination status, broken down by age group.

Chart and table of the U.K. infant mortality rate from 1950 to 2025. United Nations projections are also included through the year 2100.

The number of babies stillborn or dying before 28 days old per 1,000 live births and stillbirths. Neonatal mortality and stillbirths rates aim to reflect NHS care during pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, birth and immediately after birth. Legacy unique identifier: P01729

Annual data on death registrations by single year of age for the UK (1974 onwards) and England and Wales (1963 onwards).

The child mortality rate in the United Kingdom, for children under the age of five, was 329 deaths per thousand births in 1800. This means that approximately one in every three children born in 1800 did not make it to their fifth birthday. Over the course of the next 220 years, this number has dropped drastically, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, and the rate has dropped to its lowest point ever in 2020 where it is just four deaths per thousand births.

This data-set contains all data resources, either directly downloadable via this platform or as links to external databases, to execute the generic modeling tool as described in D5.4

• 0 generic model
  file: d5.4-generic-model_february-2020.pdf
  Report with methodology and source code for the generic model
• 1.1 COPERNICUS
  https://land.copernicus.eu/local/urban-atlas/urban-atlas-2012?tab=download.%20
  The European Urban Atlas provides reliable, inter-comparable, high-resolution land use and land cover data for 800 Functional Urban Area (FUA) for the 2012 reference year in EEA39 countries.
• 1.2a 1km grid shapefiles for NOx emissions in EU
  The shapefiles are: nox.dbf nox.prj nox.shp nox.shx
• 1.2b 1km grid shapefiles for PM10 emissions in EU
  The shapefiles are: pm10.dbf pm10.prj pm10.shp pm10.shx
• 2.1 Eurostat energy consumption data
  https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/energy/data/database?p_p_id=NavTreeportletprod_WAR_NavTreeportletprod_INSTANCE_QAMy7Pe6HwI1&p_p_lifecycle=0&p_p_state=normal&p_p_mode=view&p_p_col_id=column-2&p_p_col_count=1
• 2.2 JODI gas consumption data
  https://www.jodidata.org/gas/database/data-downloads.aspx
  Complete data series for all products, flows and countries, from January 2009 to one month-old can be downloaded, for free, in a beta version of .csv format.
• 2.3 Meteo data UK
  https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/services/data/datapoint/datapoint-products
• 2.4 Meteo data NL
  https://www.knmi.nl/nederland-nu/klimatologie/daggegevens
• 2.5 hourly electricity load profiles
  https://data.open-power-system-data.org/time_series/
• 3.1 fleet data
  file: 200210_summary_fleet_2016.csv
  Summary of historical fleet for EU28+NO by age and vehicle type: Diesel, CNG, Petrol, Electric, PHEV, LPG
• 3.2 modal shares
  file: 200210_summary_shares.csv
  This data set holds the modal share of different modes, for EU cities at level of vehicle kilometers. Modes considered: bus car heavy duty truck >32t heavy duty truck 16-32t heavy duty truck 3_5-7_5t heavy duty truck 7_5-16t light duty truck metro/tram moped motorcycle passenger train slow mode van
• 3.3 emission factors
  file: 200212_summary_copert_ef.xlsx
  Emission factor for passenger cars (in g/km )from COPERT V, urban conditions. Data dimensions: 1. type: diesel, petrol, CNG, LPG, PHEV (in line with fleet data) 2. pollutant: NOx or PM 3. Peak/off-peak: (P/OP) 4. year of built: YOB
• 5.1 Crude death rates
  http://apps.who.int/healthinfo/statistics/mortality/causeofdeath_query/start.php
  the total number of deaths in a country per year per 1,000 people broken down by age cohort and sex
• 5.2 UN population data
  https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/Standard/Population/
  the number of inhabitants at country level broken down by age cohort and sex the time a person has lived broken down by age cohort and sex, and country

In February 2025, there were 48,895 deaths in England and Wales, compared with 50,358 in February 2024. In April 2020, there were 88,038 deaths, which was an increase of almost 40,000 from the month before, and by far the month with the most deaths in this period. The dramatic increase in deaths in April can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which first hit the UK in early 2020.

Trends in Covid total deaths per million. The latest data for over 100 countries around the world.