Online calculator predicts your coronavirus risk

Researchers and health experts in the UK have designed an interactive tool that acts as a calculator predicting someone’s risk of dying due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Created by a team of clinicians, epidemiologists, statisticians and data scientists, the digital tool tries to calculate the expected “excess mortality under the COVID-19 emergency” for different people under a range of scenarios.

Essentially, anyone can try out the calculator by choosing their gender and age, as well as picking from a list of underlying conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease or a body mass index greater than 40.

Users can also toggle with the level of infection from levels related to “suppression”, “mitigation” and “do nothing”.

The calculator then spits out a percentage of that specific demographic likely to die in the UK during a year, as well as an estimated figure of excess deaths due to the pandemic (although for certain combinations it appears there isn’t enough data for the model to produce an estimate).

“The COVID-19 pandemic may cause excess mortality directly because of infection and indirectly (among those not infected) if health service changes impact quality care, and if they become overwhelmed or because of the wider social and economic upheaval,” the Health Data Research UK tool explains.

Below are the results for men aged 86 to 90 with cardiovascular disease. The orange squares represent the deaths expected in a world without COVID-19 while the red squares are the “excess” deaths due to the viral disease. The green squares are the total sample size of that demographic.

Researchers used data from more than 3.8 million health records and based their overall fatality conclusions on England having a 10 per cent infection rate and 20 per cent of people having a high-risk condition.

The tool, published in leading medical journal The Lancet, is an effort to provide a big picture understanding of the impact of the coronavirus and to help policymakers and the public tailor their responses accordingly.

“We wanted to develop this research to inform simple tools to allow interaction and exploration, by policymakers, researchers and the public,” the researchers said.

One of the lead researchers behind the calculator, Ami Banerjee, explained that members of the pubic could use the data tool to learn their own coronavirus risk in the coming year.

“For example, we show how a 66-year-old man with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease has 6 per cent risk of dying over the next year and there are 25,000 ‘patients like me’ (ie men of the same age with the same condition) in England,” he said.

“The calculator estimates 164 excess COVID-19-related deaths on top of the expected 1639 deaths over a year in patients in a similar situation.”

Dr Banerjee said tools like this one are vital in helping authorities and the public understand the risks as Britain reopens society following a strict lockdown since late March, and most importantly could help prevent avoidable deaths.

“Patients, carers, researchers & policymakers need to understand and model risks. As a first step, we have released a calculator,” he wrote on Twitter when sharing the work.

He said most of the projected fatalities were among those with pre-existing high-risk conditions and it was the treatment of the “clinically vulnerable” that needed to be prioritised.

“Most of the COVID-19 deaths have occurred in this group so the right people need to be protected properly as we ease lockdown.”

This week England tentatively began easing its coronavirus lockdown, with some people who cannot do their jobs at home urged to return to work.

Britain has been in extensive lockdown since March 23 and is the worst-hit country in Europe with more than 40,000 deaths from COVID-19 according to official data.

As of Wednesday morning, local time, people in manufacturing and certain other sectors were being asked to return to work if they could.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson who has himself recovered from a near-fatal case of COVID-19 has described the process of relaxing the lockdown as a "supremely difficult" balancing act.

The government is loosening restrictions very gradually, for fear of triggering a second peak of infections.

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