Last updated on Wednesday, 20 December 2023 at 04:15pm

COVID-19 headline ONS deaths 7 day percent change

Summary

• Topic: COVID-19
• Category: headline
• API name: COVID-19_headline_ONSdeaths_7DayPercentChange

Rationale

COVID-19 deaths depend on the scale and severity of recent COVID-19 cases.

Definition

This metric shows the percentage change between the total number of deaths in the last 7 days of people whose death certificate mentioned COVID-19 as one of the causes compared to the previous 7 days.

Deaths are reported by date of death registration.

Methodology

Deaths where COVID-19 is mentioned as one of the causes on the death certificate are reported by the Office for National Statistics.

The deceased may or may not have had a confirmed positive test for COVID-19. People who had COVID-19 but did not have it mentioned on their death certificate as a cause of death are excluded.

Deaths are allocated to the deceased's usual area of residence.

Bank holidays can affect the number of deaths registered in a given week.

There is a lag of at least 11 days in the reporting of data and the 14 days prior to the latest date available in the dataset is considered to be incomplete due to the time taken for deaths to be registered.

The percentage change in new deaths in the last 7 days is calculated as the difference between the total of the daily deaths registered in the 7 days up to and including the most recent date with "complete" data and the total of the daily deaths registered in the previous 7 days, divided by the total of the daily deaths registered in the previous 7 days.

Caveats

A change from 0 to a number greater than 0 will be displayed as 100% increase. A change from a number greater than 0 to 0 will be displayed as -100% i.e. a 100% decrease