This is the weekly number of deaths of people who have had a positive test result for COVID-19 and died within (equal to or less than) 28 days of the first positive specimen date (sum of daily deaths from Saturday-Friday of reference week) . Deaths are dated according to the date of death. This does not include deaths of people who had COVID-19 but had not been tested or people who had been tested negative and subsequently caught the virus and died. Deaths of people who had tested positively for COVID-19 could in some cases be due to a different cause. These figures are produced by Public Health England and are taken from three different sources: NHS England, PHE Health Protection Teams, and linking data on confirmed positive cases, identified through testing by NHS and PHE laboratories and commercial partners, to the NHS Demographic Batch Service. In the latter case, when a patient dies, the NHS central register of patients is notified (this is not limited to deaths in hospitals), and the list of all lab-confirmed cases is checked against this central register daily, to check if any of the patients have died. Data on deaths from these three sources are linked to the list of people who have had a diagnosis of COVID-19 confirmed by a PHE or NHS laboratory ('Pillar 1') or through testing in commercial labs ('Pillar 2'), to identify as many people with a confirmed diagnosis who have died as possible. Deaths will often appear in multiple sources, so the records are checked and merged into one database and duplicates are removed. Automated processes are used to ensure that the data are as complete as possible. Deaths reported each day cover the 24 hours up to 5pm on the day before the reporting date.