SEB BACON
As the lockdown loosens, the idea of somehow shielding “the vulnerable” is much discussed. But deciding who counts as vulnerable is fraught. In particular, many healthy and active older people bristle at the description- and especially at the idea of rules or advice that could condemn them, but not others, to stay at home.
The only case for any such discrimination must turn on relative risk. From the fi rst reports from Wuhan, it has been vaguely said that Covid- 19 is especially lethal to the “old and frail,” but it wasn’t possible to disentangle what that meant. Was the issue age itself or the conditions which, for many, tend to come along with it? But working through Open- SAFELY (a new secure health analytics platform for the pandemic, led by Ben Goldacre and Liam Smeeth), our team of 30 researchers has been able to crunch 17m anonymised GP records, including those of 5,000+ people who had died in hospital with Covid-19 by 25th April. In this trove of NHS data, we can pinpoint the factors that ramp up the risks.