Men, black people, the elderly and those with diabetes are at the highest risk of dying if they catch Covid-19, the biggest study to date ...
Men, black people, the elderly and those with diabetes are at the highest risk of dying if they catch Covid-19, the biggest study to date has confirmed.
Researchers from the University of Oxford and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have trawled through NHS patient records in England to spot the biggest risk factors.
They found that being over the age of 80 was the single factor most likely to raise someone's risk of death, with an octogenarian 20 times more likely to die than a person in their fifties.
The study, which is the biggest one of its kind in the world so far, looked at the medical records of 17.2million people and almost 11,000 Covid-19 deaths in England.
It did not produce ground-breaking results but used a huge dataset to confirm suspicions raised in small studies about who is most at risk of coronavirus.
Black people were found to be 48 per cent more likely to die than white people if they caught the virus, while South Asians - of Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi ethnicity, for example - had a 44 per cent higher risk.
Men are 59 per cent more likely to die if they catch Covid-19 than women, the study found, while being in the most deprived sector of society raised risk by 80 per cent.
And having diabetes raised the risk between 31 and 95 per cent, depending on how severe someone's condition was.
Research by the University of Oxford and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine trawled through the medical records of almost 11,000 people who have died of Covid-19 (Pictured: An intensive care unit at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge)
Professor Ben Neuman, a biologist at Texas A&M University and the University of Reading in England, was not involved with the research but said: 'This extremely large study authoritatively confirms much of what smaller studies had proposed about the relative risk of death from Covid-19 based on age, biological sex, obesity, diabetes and other respiratory problems.'
Dr Tom Wingfield, a doctor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, added: 'The broader take-home message underlying these findings is that the health of our nation and its citizens continues to be deeply influenced by social factors including poverty, race, and inequality, and Covid-19 is no exception.'
The study compared the records of 10, 926 people who died with the coronavirus in hospitals in England with health information about 17.2million anonymous patients.
By looking at the rates of death in each group they could compare how each factor changed somebody's risk of dying with Covid-19.
The general group that had the most proportional deaths in those 11,000 patients was those over the age of 80, of whom 0.57 per cent died - one in every 175 people. This was a total of 6,474 deaths.
The death rate was higher only in the group of people who had kidney failure, of whom 1.11 per cent died.
Almost all long-term health conditions increased somebody's risk of dying from coronavirus, the gigantic study found.
It concluded: 'Most comorbidities [illnesses] were associated with increased risk, including cardiovascular [heart[ disease, diabetes, respiratory disease including severe asthma, obesity, history of haematological malignancy [blood cancer] or recent other cancer, kidney, liver, neurological and autoimmune conditions.
'People from South Asian and black groups had a substantially higher risk of death, only partially attributable to co-morbidity, deprivation or other risk factors.'
One thing that stood out, however, was the fact that people with high blood pressure did not seem to have a greater risk of death compared to people without the condition.
Throughout the pandemic this illness - also known as hypertension - has been thought to contribute to the risk of dying of Covid-19.
But the statistics in the Oxford study found that risk appeared to be 13 per cent lower for people who had the illness.
The researchers said: 'The reasons for the inverse association between hypertension and mortality in older individuals are unclear and warrant further investigation'.
Professor Ben Neuman added: 'This study only looks at risk of death, which simplifies the statistical problem considerably, but does not capture the range of other debilitating disease associated with COVID-19 even in groups that have a relatively low risk of death, such as children and younger women.
'I think the key to a study like this will be whether or how it translates into policy.
'A risk is that if policies are aimed at limiting death, for example by keeping schools open, but do not take account of other serious economic and health consequences of prolonging the pandemic rather than ending it, would not serve Britain well in the long term.'
The research was published in the journal Nature.
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