ISLAMABAD – Researchers have developed a new online calculator forestimating the individual and community-level risk of dying from Covid-19.
The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, revealed that thecalculator will be useful to public health authorities for assessingmortality risks in different communities, and for prioritizing certaingroups for vaccination as Covid-19 vaccines become available.
The algorithm underlying the calculator uses information from existinglarge studies to estimate risk of Covid-19 mortality for individuals basedon age, gender, sociodemographic factors and a variety of different healthconditions, Medical daily reported .
The risk estimates apply to individuals in the general population who arecurrently uninfected and captures factors associated with both risks offuture infection and complications after infection.
“Our calculator represents a more quantitative approach and shouldcomplement other proposed qualitative guidelines for determining individualand community risks and allocating vaccines,” said study senior authorNilanjan Chatterjee from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of PublicHealth in the US.
The calculator based on the model is available online for public healthofficials and interested individuals alike.
It enables a user to determine individual risk based on factors such asage, sex, race/ethnicity, and medical history and can be used to definerisk for a group, such as for a particular community, corporation, oruniversity, based on the mix of relevant factors that define the group.
In their paper, the research team used their calculator to describe therisk distribution for the whole US population, showing, for example, thatonly about four per cent of the population at high risk — defined as fivetimes greater risk than the US average — is expected to contribute close to50 per cent of the total deaths.
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The researchers also showed that population-level risk varies considerablyfrom city to city and county to county.
“For example, the percentage of the adult population exceeding the fivefoldrisk threshold varies from 0.4 per cent in Layton, Utah, to 10.7 per centin Detroit, Michigan,” Chatterjee said.
The calculator allows users to calculate the mortality risk of individualsby combining information on individual-level factors with community-levelpandemic dynamics, as available from a large variety of forecasting models.
Thus, when a big wave of infections hits a population, the risk estimatesfor individuals will rise in that community.
Currently, the tool is updated on a weekly basis to incorporate informationon state-level pandemic dynamics.
