Number of excess deaths, including deaths due to coronavirus (COVID-19) and due to other causes. Including breakdowns by age, sex and geography.

For the week ending March 7, 2025, weekly deaths in England and Wales were 124 below the number expected, compared with 460 fewer than expected in the previous week. In late 2022, and through early 2023, excess deaths were elevated for a number of weeks, with the excess deaths figure for the week ending January 13, 2023, the highest since February 2021. In the middle of April 2020, at the height of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, there were almost 12,000 excess deaths a week recorded in England and Wales. It was not until two months later, in the week ending June 19, 2020, that the number of deaths began to be lower than the five-year average for the corresponding week. Most deaths since 1918 in 2020 In 2020, there were 689,629 deaths in the United Kingdom, making that year the deadliest since 1918, at the height of the Spanish influenza pandemic. As seen in the excess death figures, April 2020 was by far the worst month in terms of deaths during the pandemic. The weekly number of deaths for weeks 16 and 17 of that year were 22,351, and 21,997 respectively. Although the number of deaths fell to more usual levels for the rest of that year, a winter wave of the disease led to a high number of deaths in January 2021, with 18,676 deaths recorded in the fourth week of that year. For the whole of 2021, there were 667,479 deaths in the UK, 22,150 fewer than in 2020. Life expectancy in the UK goes into reverse In 2022, life expectancy at birth for women in the UK was 82.6 years, while for men it was 78.6 years. This was the lowest life expectancy in the country for ten years, and came after life expectancy improvements stalled throughout the 2010s, and then declined from 2020 onwards. There is also quite a significant regional difference in life expectancy in the UK. In the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, for example, the life expectancy for men was 81.5 years, and 86.5 years for women. By contrast, in Blackpool, in North West England, male life expectancy was just 73.1 years, while for women life expectancy was lowest in Glasgow, at 78 years.

Deaths registered in England and Wales in 2020 and how they compared with the five-year average (2015 to 2019), based on finalised 2020 mortality data. The figures are broken down by cause, place of death, age group, sex and deprivation.

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.

Provisional counts of the number of total deaths and deaths not involving the coronavirus (COVID-19), between 28 December 2019 and 10 July 2020. This includes deaths disaggregated by age and sex; by region of England, and Wales, and place of death; and for underlying causes of death and deaths involving leading causes.

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.

Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a new strain of coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, China. Clinical presentation may range from mild-to-moderate illness to pneumonia or severe acute respiratory infection. The COVID-19 pandemic has wider impacts on individuals' health, and their use of healthcare services, than those that occur as the direct result of infection. Reasons for this may include: * Individuals being reluctant to use health services because they do not want to burden the NHS or are anxious about the risk of infection. * The health service delaying preventative and non-urgent care such as some screening services and planned surgery. * Other indirect effects of interventions to control COVID-19, such as mental or physical consequences of distancing measures. This dataset provides information on trend data regarding the wider impact of the pandemic on the number of deaths in Scotland, derived from the National Records of Scotland (NRS) weekly deaths registration data. Data show recent trends in deaths (2020), whether COVID or non-COVID related, and historic trends for comparison (five-year average, 2015-2019). The recent trend data are shown by age group and sex, and the national data are also shown by broad area deprivation category (Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, SIMD). This data is also available on the COVID-19 Wider Impact Dashboard. Additional data sources relating to this topic area are provided in the Links section of the Metadata below. Information on COVID-19, including stay at home advice for people who are self-isolating and their households, can be found on NHS Inform. All publications and supporting material to this topic area can be found in the weekly COVID-19 Statistical Report. The date of the next release can be found on our list of forthcoming publications.

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.

Deaths registered in England and Wales by week, from 28 December 2019 to 2 July 2021. Breakdowns include country, sex, age group, region, place of death, and leading cause. Includes analysis of excess deaths and relative cumulative age-standardised mortality rates.

Background and aimWith the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continuing to impact healthcare systems around the world, healthcare providers are attempting to balance resources devoted to COVID-19 patients while minimizing excess mortality overall (both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients). To this end, we conducted a systematic review (SR) to describe the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on all-cause excess mortality (COVID-19 and non-COVID-19) during the pandemic timeframe compared to non-pandemic times.MethodsWe searched EMBASE, Cochrane Database of SRs, MEDLINE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) and Cochrane Controlled Trials Register (CENTRAL), from inception (1948) to December 31, 2020. We used a two-stage review process to screen/extract data. We assessed risk of bias using Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS). We used Critical Appraisal and Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) methodology.ResultsOf 11,581 citations, 194 studies met eligibility. Of these studies, 31 had mortality comparisons (n = 433,196,345 participants). Compared to pre-pandemic times, during the COVID-19 pandemic, our meta-analysis demonstrated that COVID-19 mortality had an increased risk difference (RD) of 0.06% (95% CI: 0.06–0.06% p < 0.00001). All-cause mortality also increased [relative risk (RR): 1.53, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.38–1.70, p < 0.00001] alongside non-COVID-19 mortality (RR: 1.18, 1.07–1.30, p < 0.00001). There was “very low” certainty of evidence through GRADE assessment for all outcomes studied, demonstrating the evidence as uncertain.InterpretationThe COVID-19 pandemic may have caused significant increases in all-cause excess mortality, greater than those accounted for by increases due to COVID-19 mortality alone, although the evidence is uncertain.Systematic review registration[https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/#recordDetails], identifier [CRD42020201256].

UPDATE February 2021: Two issues affecting the contextual information for indicator 1.5.i have been identified. Neither of these issues affected the indicator values and both have been corrected in the excel and CSV files for this indicator: Issue 1: The confidence intervals for the mental health mortality rate were originally calculated using Dobson’s method for counts where less than 389 deaths were observed. Although this is a valid method, the assured methodology for this indicator does not include this adjustment. The indicator specification has also been updated to remove reference to Dobson's method. Issue 2: There were some minor errors in the England level mental health population due to the inclusion of some duplicates. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This indicator is a measure of the extent to which adults with a serious mental illness (SMI) die younger than adults without a serious mental illness (nSMI). To measure premature mortality in adults diagnosed with serious mental illness (SMI). This indicator was put on hold in November 2016. The introduction of the new mental health services data set (MHSDS) meant that a new indicator methodology needed to be developed. The indicator was republished with new data in December 2020. The republished data uses a different methodology to the data published in 2016 and prior to this. As such, comparisons should not be made between the two. Legacy unique identifier: P01740

Annual data on deaths registered by age, sex and selected underlying cause of death. Tables also provide both mortality rates and numbers of deaths over time.

Young Lives research has expanded to explore linking geographical data collected during the rounds to external datasets. Matching Young Lives data with administrative and geographic datasets significantly increases the scope for research in several areas, and may allow researchers to identify sources of exogenous variation for more convincing causal analysis on policy and/or early life circumstances.

Young Lives: Data Matching Series, 1900-2021 includes the following linked datasets:

1. Climate Matched Datasets (four YL study countries): Community-level GPS data has been matched with temperature and precipitation data from the University of Delaware. Climate variables are offered at the community level, with a panel data structure spanning across years and months. Hence, each community has a unique value of precipitation (variable PRCP) and temperature (variable TEMP), for each year and month pairing for the period 1900-2017.

2. COVID-19 Matched Dataset (Peru only): The YL Phone Survey Calls data has been matched with external data sources (The Peruvian Ministry of Health and the National Information System of Deaths in Peru). The matched dataset includes the total number of COVID cases per 1,000 inhabitants, the total number of COVID deaths by district and per 1,000 inhabitants; the total number of excess deaths per 1,000 inhabitants and the number of lockdown days in each Young Lives district in Peru during August 2020 to December 2021.

Further information is available in the PDF reports included in the study documentation.

This is the dataset for the study of "Social dilemma in the excess use of antimicrobials incurring antimicrobial resistance". The emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) caused by the excess use of antimicrobials has come to be recognized as a global threat to public health. There is a ‘tragedy of the commons’ type social dilemma behind this excessive use of antimicrobials, which should be recognized by all stakeholders. To address this global threat, we thus surveyed eight countries/areas to determine whether people recognize this dilemma and showed that although more than half of the population pays little, if any, attention to it, almost 20% recognize this social dilemma, and 15–30% of those have a positive attitude toward solving that dilemma. We suspect that increasing individual awareness of this social dilemma contributes to decreasing the frequency of AMR emergencies. Methods We designed a questionnaire to observe a social dilemma in the excess use of antimicrobials incurring antimicrobial resistance by placing two types of imaginary artificial-intelligence (AI) physicians who perform medical practice from either an individual or societal perspective. We assume two AI medical diagnosis systems: “Individual precedence AI” (abbreviated Individual-AI) and “World precedence AI” (abbreviated World-AI). Both AIs diagnose and prescribe medicine automatically. The Individual-AI system diagnoses patients and prescribes medicine to prevent infections based on an individual perspective, including all prophylactic prescriptions against rare accidental infections (not yet present and unlikely to occur). It does not consider the global risk of AMR in the decision. The World-AI system, instead, takes into account the global mortality rate of AMR, aiming to reduce the total number of all AMR-related deaths. Because of this, this AI system does not prescribe antimicrobials against rare and not-yet-present infections. This questionnaire design allows us to observe the social dilemma. For example, it shows a typical social dilemma caused by preferring the use of Individual-AI for diagnosing oneself but preferring the use of World-AI for diagnosing strangers.

The survey entitled “Survey on Medical Advancement” was administered to 8 countries/areas. The survey was conducted 4 times. For the two surveys in Japan, an internet survey company, Cross Marketing Inc. (https://www.cross-m.co.jp/en/), created the questionnaire webpages based on our study design. The company also collected the data. As of April 2020, Cross Marketing Inc. has 4.79 million people in an active panel (survey participants who registered in advance). Here, the definition of an active panel is a survey respondent who has been active within the last year. For the panels, the questionnaire and response column were displayed on the website through which the respondents could complete and submit their responses. We extracted 500 submissions for each gender and each age group by random sampling from all samples collected during the survey periods. The surveys in the 7 countries/areas (i.e., the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Taiwan, Australia, Brazil, and Russia) are conducted by Cint (https://www.cint.com/). Cint is the world’s largest consumer network for digital survey-based research. The headquarters of the company is in Sweden. Cint maintains a survey platform that contained more than 100 million consumer monitors in over 80 countries as of May 2020. For surveys in the US, UK, Sweden, Taiwan, Australia, Brazil, and Russia, Cint Japan (https://jp.cint.com/), which is the Japanese distributor of Cint, created translated questionnaire webpages based on our study design. The company also collected the data. We extracted at least 500 (US, UK, SWE, BRA, RUS) or 250 (TWN, AUS) submissions for each gender (male and female) and each age group (20 s, 30 s, 40 s, 50 s, and 60 s) by random sampling from all samples collected between survey periods. Note that both companies eliminated inconsistent or apathetic respondents. For example, respondents with inconsistent responses (e.g., the registered age of the respondent differed from the reported age at the time of the survey.) were eliminated before reaching the authors. In addition, respondents with significantly short response times (i.e., shorter than 1 min) were eliminated because they may not have read the questions carefully.

Excess mortality for England & Wales calculated for the “Russian influenza” pandemic (1890–1892 in the UK) and COVID-19 (2020 and 2021 only).