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- Older age. People of any age, even children, can catch COVID-19. But it most commonly affects middle-aged and older adults. The risk of developing dangerous symptoms increases with age, with those who are age 85 and older at the highest risk of serious symptoms.
- Lung problems, including asthma. COVID-19 targets the lungs, so you're more likely to develop severe symptoms if you already have lung problems, such as
- Heart disease. Many types of heart disease can make you more likely to develop severe COVID-19 symptoms. These include: Cardiomyopathy. Pulmonary hypertension.
- Diabetes and obesity. Type 1 or type 2 diabetes can increase your risk of serious COVID-19 symptoms. Having a higher body mass index that’s considered overweight, obese or severely obese also increases this risk.
Mar 1, 2024 · Illnesses caused by respiratory viruses like COVID-19, flu, and RSV can make anyone sick. However, there are a range of risk factors that can increase a person’s chances of getting very sick (severe illness).
- Introduction
- Questions on The Pathogen
- Questions on The Disease
- Epidemiological Questions
- Reflections and Advice For A Future CMO Or GCSA
Particularly in the early days of the pandemic, there was pressure to develop rapid evidence on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. This was driven by important operational and policy questions at the outset of this public health emergency, such as: 1. what were the sensible options for response, and were there public health interventions that could interrupt...
1. What was this pathogen?
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when information on SARS-CoV-2 itself was limited, initial risk assessments and hypothesis generation for research drew upon what was already known about similar pathogens. Fortunately, identification and initial characterisation of the causative virus came swiftly. This early virological information fed into risk assessments about the nature of the virus and its risk to the population, when and whether it would be imported into the UK, as well as suppor...
2. What information could be gathered about the pathogen that could help develop an initial diagnostic test?
Testing to identify cases had multiple applications throughout this pandemic, supporting clinical management, infection prevention and control (especially in health and care settings), contact tracing, surveillance, and to understand transmission force, transmission routes and severe disease rates. Testing was especially important because the symptoms of COVID-19 were often non-specific, minimal or absent. It was therefore an early priority – in the UK and globally – to develop diagnostic tes...
3. What information about the pathogen and the disease could support targeting of appropriate repurposed and newly developed pharmaceutical interventions?
Pharmaceutical interventions (PIs) were an early priority as a means to reduce morbidity and mortality – both directly due to COVID-19 disease and indirectly from healthcare disruption due to high numbers of severe cases. This section sets out the information required on the pathogen and the host response to guide and support PI development in this pandemic; how this evidence was generated; advice based on this experience. This is set broadly into 2 sections covering the different types of in...
5. How severe was this disease, and were there longer-term sequelae?
Gauging the potential impact of COVID-19, and the appropriate response to take, heavily relied on understanding both the severity of acute disease and its possible longer-term sequelae.[footnote 68]The degree of severity and its underlying causes will be central to the management of any future pandemic or epidemic. This section sets out evidence evolved on mortality and morbidity, both acute and chronic, for COVID-19.
6. What was the duration of naturally acquired and vaccine acquired immunity, and the risk of reinfection over time?
Duration of immunity (natural or vaccine-derived) and risk of reinfection has varied widely in epidemic-potential infections, ranging from lifelong infections such as HIV, infections where a single infection generally confers lifelong protection such as measles, and infections where prior infection provides partial, temporary, or minimal protection from subsequent infection such as influenza and malaria. Cross-protection between different variants of a disease is also highly variable. As a no...
7. What were the case definitions?
Establishing case definitions is an essential step in any pandemic or major epidemic. As a new disease, the case definitions for COVID-19 evolved over time. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, as with most common infectious diseases, case definitions were used for 3 differentiated but overlapping purposes: 1. public health: contact tracing, outbreak investigations, and communication to the public – for example, on when to isolate 2. epidemiological: surveillance 3. clinical: provision of healthca...
8. What were the important routes of transmission?
Evidence on routes of transmission was important for guiding the pandemic response, especially in the early stages where NPIs were the only interventions that were available.[footnote 175], [footnote 176], [footnote 177] Evidence of this kind has been important in previous pandemics and recent epidemics, such as HIV (sexual and intravenous), Ebola virus (touch) or Zika virus (vector), and it will be for any future pandemic or major epidemic. It was established early that the likely principal...
9. What were the higher risk settings for transmission?
In this pandemic it has been important to understand higher risk settings for transmission in order to target mitigation measures at those locations where they would have the greatest impact.
Most of the reflections are in the body of the text above, but in addition we would highlight the following.
May 13, 2022 · Transmission risk can be considered using a Risk equals Hazard multiplied by Exposure methodology, where the risk depends on both the amount of virus present and the duration and method of...
- 1. We consider transmission through airborne, droplet and contact routes and consider the evidence relating to time spent in an environment, distan...
- 12. EMG has considered 4 groups of questions around transmission focusing on: the relationship between time spent in an environment and risk the ro...
- Relationships between transmission, occupancy and exposure timei. How does the length of time spent in an environment affect the rate of transmissi...
- Andrews, Jason R., Carl Morrow, and Robin Wood. ‘Modelling the role of public transportation in sustaining tuberculosis transmission in South Afric...
Nov 24, 2020 · In this category, the most commonly noted COVID-19 risk factors were Underlying Health Conditions (n = 81) and High Blood Pressure (n = 17). Less frequently noted risk factors included: Body Weight, Genetic, Pregnancy, Blood Type, High Blood Sugar, and Hormones.
- Rebecca Elmore, Lena Schmidt, Juleen Lam, Brian E. Howard, Arpit Tandon, Christopher Norman, Jason P...
- 10.3389/fpubh.2020.582205
- 2020
- Front Public Health. 2020; 8: 582205.
To investigate risk factors for healthcare worker (HCW) infection in viral respiratory pandemics: severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), SARS CoV-1, influenza A H1N1, influenza H5N1.
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Jan 19, 2022 · Currently, a number of risk factors have been identified to have a potential impact on increasing the morbidity of COVID-19 in adults, including old age, male sex, pre-existing comorbidities, and racial/ethnic disparities.
