Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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The data requested by the Deputy is not yet available.All deaths that occur in the State must be registered within 3 months from the date of death; for example, a death that occurred in May 2020 may not be registered until the end of August 2020. Therefore, the information requested is not yetavailable for comparison purposes to the same periods in the last five years. Furthermore, all deaths involving COVID-19 are reportable to the Coroner's office and are registered on receipt of the Coroner's certificate.

Mortality data is encrypted and received electronically on a weekly basis from the General Registration Office (GRO). Mortality coders in the Central Statistics Office (CSO) then assign an Underlying Cause Of Death (UCOD) code to each mortality record. The UCOD is based on the medical condition(s)/disease(s) reported on the death certificate and this is coded to the WHO International Classification of Diseases, ICD-10. In the case of an unnatural death, the UCOD is based on the verdict of the Coroner and, in some instances, the information returned to the CSO on a Form 104 (i.e. a form completed by a member of An Garda Síochána that attended the death scene). There is, therefore, a time lag between the receipt of the raw data from the GRO and completion of all coding by the CSO and as a result, the publication of quarterly data based on the date of registration of a death is generally 5 months after the end of a given reference period.

The CSO is scheduled to publish Quarter 1 (Q1) 2020 data in August 2020, allowing time for COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 deaths to be registered for that quarter, while Quarter 2 (Q2) 2020 data are scheduled for publication in November 2020.An additional information note was also published on the CSO website on the implications of COVID-19 on the processing of death certificates and is available at the following link: