The largest study yet confirms that race, ethnicity, age and gender can raise a person’s chances of dying from Covid-19.
An analysis of more than 17 million people in England — the largest study of its kind, according to its authors — has pinpointed a bevy of factors that can raise a person’s chances of dying from Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
“This highlights a lot of what we already know about Covid-19,†said Uchechi Mitchell, a public health expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was not involved in the study.
Ben Goldacre of the University of Oxford, one of the authors on the study.
Goldacre’s team found that patients older than 80 were at least 20 times more likely to die from Covid-19 than those in their 50s, and hundreds of times more likely to die than those below the age of 40.
And the researchers noted that a person’s chances of dying also tended to track with socioeconomic factors like poverty.
The data roughly mirror what has been observed around the world and are not necessarily surprising, said Avonne Connor, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study.
Particularly compelling were the study’s findings on race and ethnicity, said Sharrelle Barber, an epidemiologist at Drexel University who was not involved in the study.
But because Black individuals are also more likely to experience stress and be denied access to medical care in many parts of the world, the disparity in rates of heart disease may itself be influenced by racism, said Usama Bilal, an epidemiologist at Drexel University who was not involved in the new analysis.
The study was also not set up to conclusively show cause-and-effect relationships between risk factors and Covid-19 deaths.
Any study publishing data on an ongoing and fast-shifting pandemic will inevitably be imperfect, said Julia Raifman, an epidemiologist at Boston University who was not involved in the study.
UK
Australia
France
Germany
Russia
India
Canada