Changing our understanding of COVID-19
Ian Jarrold, our Deputy Head of Research and Innovation, tells us about OpenSAFELY, an Asthma UK and British Lung Foundation-funded research project that has changed our understanding of COVID-19, and helped protect vulnerable people.
In early 2020, all of our lives were turned upside down by COVID-19, a condition caused by a respiratory virus that brought the world to a standstill. Since then, the pandemic has caused millions of deaths, extraordinary economic damage, and a wide range of negative knock-on effects.
When it first emerged, COVID-19 was a brand-new disease. One of the biggest initial challenges was understanding what we were dealing with as quickly as possible in an effort to build an effective response. In a race against time, medical research offered the best tool for doing this.
A collaborative approach
With this in mind, early on in the pandemic we collaborated with the Medical Research Council to co-fund a COVID-19 research grant to support a project led by Dr Ben Goldacre at the University of Oxford, called ‘OpenSAFELY’. We contributed £250k to this £1.3m grant award, allowing us to support a much larger research project than we could on our own - and gain more value from our precious donations.
A new precedent for medical research
As part of this project, Dr Goldacre and the OpenSAFELY team developed a new secure ‘platform’ for analysing electronic NHS health records which could be used to study Covid-19. This platform allows researchers to study NHS data related without ever getting their hands on the data itself. This means they can interrogate the data and ask questions to understand the pandemic but can’t access personal information about individuals. So, importantly, research carried out through OpenSAFELY will never lead to leaks of personal data.
Enabling a broad range of research
The idea was that the platform would enable a broad range of research on, for example, who gets Covid, the consequences of Covid, and how best to restore NHS services following significant disruption due to the pandemic.
The project has already delivered important results that have helped policymakers and doctors to deal with the pandemic. Some of these findings include:
Who’s most at risk from Covid?
By studying the health records of 17 million people, OpenSAFELY identified with more accuracy than any previous work which people are most at risk of dying with COVID-19. Higher risk groups include people who are male, older, come from a more deprived background, or have an existing health condition like severe asthma, diabetes or HIV. There were also differences in people from different ethnic backgrounds, with black and south Asian people at higher risk.
What are the risks associated with different variants of the Covid virus?
This work found that the Alpha variant (formerly known as the Kent variant) was associated with two-thirds higher deaths than the previously circulating virus in an unvaccinated population.
This work looked at the early phase of the vaccination programme from December 2020 to January 2021. It showed that black people aged over 80 were almost half as likely to have had a Covid vaccine than white people over 80. It also suggests that targeted activity may be helpful to address lower vaccination rates observed among certain key groups: ethnic minorities, people living in areas of higher deprivation, and people with severe mental illness or learning disabilities.
Changing our understanding of COVID-19
This research has changed our understanding of COVID-19 and has helped protect vulnerable people during the pandemic. And the platform will continue to be crucial in the ongoing fight against COVID-19. It will also help our health systems to restore services across all conditions and help us to be better-prepared for pandemics in the future. Moreover, it sets a new precedent for the secure study of healthcare data to benefit everyone.
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