New Delhi: An analysis of 17 million people in England has revealed a number of risk factors, including race and sex, that increase a person’s chances of succumbing to Covid-19, say reports. Authors of the study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday maintain that it is the largest of its kind so far.
Covering 40 per cent of all patients in England, primary care records of 17,278,392 adults were pseudonymously linked to 10,926 deaths caused due to Covid-19. The study concluded that Covid-19 related deaths were associated with being male and above a certain age, along with other factors including deprivation, diabetes, severe asthma and other medical conditions.
One of the authors of the study, Dr Ben Goldacre of the University of Oxford said “A lot of previous work has focused on patients that present at hospital.” He added, “That’s useful and important, but we wanted to get a clear sense of the risks as an everyday person. Our starting pool is literally everybody.” His team’s findings revealed that patients who were older than 80s were 20 times more likely to die of the virus in comparison to those in their 50s.
Further, patients in their 80s were hundred times more likely to die from Covid-19 than those below 40. While this largely corresponds with studies around the world, it is the researchers’ findings on race and ethnicity that are more surprising.
The study revealed that Black and South Asian people are at a higher risk of dying due to the virus in comparison to White Covid-19 patients. Out of the 17 million people studied, 11 per cent came from non-White ethnicities.
A key limitation of the study was that it included clinically suspected Covid-19 cases in the study as opposed to laboratory-confirmed cases. This could result in some patients being incorrectly identified as Covid-positive.
Ellie Murray, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Boston University of Public Health, also pointed out that the study was “applying conclusions about causation to results obtained via methods designed only for finding correlations”.
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So far, it is already known that older individuals and those with co-morbidities are more vulnerable to the virus. However, it is the very scale of this particular study that has become its strength.
Uchechi Mitchell, a public health expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago told The New York Times, “This highlights a lot of what we already know about Covid-19,” but added, “a lot of science is about repetition. The size of the study alone is a strength, and there is a need to continue documenting disparities.”
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