According to a new British study, the largest ever carried out on SARS-CoV-2, the risk of death from coronavirus in hospital is doubled for people in their sixties, five times for people in their seventies and multiplied by twelve from the age of 80.
Since the start of the Covid epidemic, we have known that the elderly are more at risk. Today, a large English study shows that the older you are, the more likely you are to have a chronic disease and therefore to die from SARS-CoV-2. In their work, the preliminary results of which have appeared in the journal Medrixv, the researchers calculated that the risk of death from coronavirus in hospital was doubled for people in their sixties, fivefold for people in their seventies and multiplied by twelve from the age of 80 (compared to the age group 50-60). This is currently the largest study ever conducted on Covid-19.
To reach these sad conclusions, researchers from the University of Oxford (UK) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) analyzed health data from more than 17 .4 million UK adults through government platform OpenSAFELY. Of these people, 5,683 died from Covid-19.
The researchers thus arrived at several findings already demonstrated concerning the most vulnerable to the virus. First of all, people of Asian and black ethnicity are more likely to die from Covid-19 than white people, perhaps because they suffer more from cardiovascular problems and diabetes… Men, socially disadvantaged people , elderly, diabetics or those with severe asthma are also at higher risk, the scientists noted.
Answers “of essential importance for the whole world”
“We need highly accurate data on which patients are most at risk in order to manage the pandemic and improve patient care. The answers provided by this analysis of OpenSAFELY are of vital importance for countries around the world”welcomes Professor Liam Smeeth, professor of clinical epidemiology, co-author of the study.
“That means we need very large and very current datasets. The UK has phenomenal data coverage and quality. We owe it to patients to secure their data and to the global community to use it well. That’s why we’ve developed a new, highly secure model that allows data to be analyzed where it already resides.”continues Dr. Ben Goldacre, co-responsible for the study.
OpenSAFELY used to track the spread of the epidemic
Other analyzes carried out using OpenSAFELY are already in progress. Among them, research on the effects of specific drugs commonly prescribed in primary care. The platform can also be used to assess the spread of the epidemic through innovative modeling approaches, to forecast the needs of local health services, to assess the indirect effects of the pandemic on health, to monitor the impact of national interventions or to provide information on the aftermath–confinement. The United Kingdom has moreover started its deconfinement Wednesday May 13, two days after France.
In France, a graphic revealing the distribution of people who died of Covid-19 between 1er March and April 21, by age group, showed that 71% of SARS-CoV-2 victims were aged 75 and over. As of Thursday May 14, 27,000 people had died of the coronavirus, including 9,973 in nursing homes and specialized medical establishments, according to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health.
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