As countries around the world shift their focus to the deployment of the Covid-19 vaccine, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health have developed a new online calculator for ‘Covid mortality risk -19 ”to help prioritize certain groups for vaccination.
“The researchers who developed the calculator hope that it will be useful for public health authorities to assess mortality risks in different communities and to prioritize certain groups for vaccination as Covid-19 vaccines become available,” according to an official statement. .
The calculator is currently used to estimate Covid-19 mortality risks in people in the United States. The calculator is based on an algorithm that takes advantage of information from large existing studies to estimate the risk of mortality from Covid-19 for people based on age, sex, sociodemographic factors and different health conditions.
“Our calculator represents a more quantitative approach and should complement other proposed qualitative guidelines, such as those from the National Academy of Sciences and Medicine, for determining individual and community risks and assigning vaccines,” said study lead author Nilanjan Chatterjee, PhD. , Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the departments of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Bloomberg School.
The study detailing the risk calculator is presented in an article published in the journal Natural medicine.
The researchers also developed an interactive map to show numbers and the proportion of people at various risk levels in cities, counties, and states within the United States in collaboration with PolicyMap Inc.
“People can broadly understand that with a pre-existing condition like obesity or diabetes, for example, they are at higher risk, but with our calculator, they should be able to understand their risk in a way that takes into account multiple factors,” Chatterjee said.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) earlier this week granted the US drug manufacturer Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech the Emergency Use Authorization (US) for its Covid-19 vaccine.
Earlier this month, the UK also granted a temporary authorization for emergency use for the Pfizer / BioNTech Covid-19 (BNT162b2) mRNA vaccine, against Covid-19. Other countries such as Bahrain, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Mexico have approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine based on previous reports.