Article – Published: 08 July 2020
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OpenSAFELY: factors associated with COVID-19 death in 17 million patients
Elizabeth J. Williamson, Alex J. Walker, Krishnan Bhaskaran, Seb Bacon, Chris Bates, Caroline E. Morton, Helen J. Curtis, Amir Mehrkar, David Evans, Peter Inglesby, Jonathan Cockburn, Helen I. McDonald, Brian MacKenna, Laurie Tomlinson, Ian J. Douglas, Christopher T. Rentsch, Rohini Mathur, Angel Y. S. Wong, Richard Grieve, David Harrison, Harriet Forbes, Anna Schultze, Richard Croker, John Parry, Frank Hester, Sam Harper, Rafael Perera, Stephen J. W. Evans, Liam Smeeth & Ben Goldacre
Abstract
COVID-19 has rapidly affected mortality worldwide1. There is unprecedented urgency to understand who is most at risk of severe outcomes, requiring new approaches for timely analysis of large datasets. Working on behalf of NHS England, here we created OpenSAFELY: a secure health analytics platform covering 40% of all patients in England, holding patient data within the existing data centre of a major primary care electronic health records vendor. Primary care records of 17,278,392 adults were pseudonymously linked to 10,926 COVID-19-related deaths. COVID-19-related death was associated with: being male (hazard ratio (HR) 1.59, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.53–1.65); older age and deprivation (both with a strong gradient); diabetes; severe asthma; and various other medical conditions. Compared with people with white ethnicity, Black and South Asian people were at higher risk even after adjustment for other factors (HR 1.48, 1.30–1.69 and 1.44, 1.32–1.58, respectively). We have quantified a range of clinical risk factors for COVID-19-related death in the largest cohort study conducted by any country to date. OpenSAFELY is rapidly adding further patients’ records; we will update and extend results regularly.