Data from the United Kingdom confirm that males, older people, and those with underlying health conditions have a higher risk of COVID-19 death. They also indicate that black and Asian individuals also face a heightened risk not entirely explained by preexisting health factors.
In working to find the best strategies to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have been asking a key question for prevention: Who is most at risk of severe outcomes if they develop COVID-19?
Existing evidence has suggested that the people most likely to face a higher risk of COVID-19 death are older males (over 50 years), especially if they have a chronic underlying health condition, such as cardiovascular problems or diabetes.
Yet there is some indication that there may be another significant risk factor for severe COVID-19 outcomes, namely, a person’s race, and their ethnicity.
For example, data from the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) have shown that black males are 4.2 times more likely than white males to die with COVID-19.
Also, according to the ONS, black females are 4.3 times more likely than white females to die from COVID-19-related causes.
But why this may be remains unclear, which has prompted researchers to call for urgent in-depth investigations into how COVID-19 impacts people from diverse ethnic backgrounds.
Now, a team of researchers from the OpenSAFELY Collaborative — an initiative from the University of Oxford and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, in collaboration with other U.K. institutions — has set out to pinpoint more potential major risk factors for COVID-19 deaths.
The investigators weighed the data of 17,425,445 adults who had registered with a general practitioner in the U.K. for at least 1 year.
They searched for people who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 between February 1 and April 21, 2020. Then, they linked these data with other patient information processed through OpenSAFELY, a platform that anonymizes patient information in primary care records.
The researchers repo