The American newspaper "New York Times" said that the largest study prepared to date on the emerging corona virus, which included more than 17 million people, revealed the factors that increase a person's risk of death when infected with the virus.

The study, published in the journal "Nature," attributed the fact that age, gender, race, and health conditions are among the most important reasons that determine the chances of death when infected with the virus.

"A lot of study information is already known, but the size of the study alone is the most important, and there is a need to continue to document the disparities," said Uchiichi Mitchell, a public health expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who was not involved in the study.

The researchers extracted a large set of data from the health records of more than 17.28 million people (about 40% of England's population), and it was collected by the UK's National Health Service, over a three-month period.

"A lot of previous studies have focused on patients in the hospital, this is useful and important, but we wanted to get a clear idea of ​​the risks as an ordinary person," said Dr. Ben Goldaaker of Oxford University, one of the authors involved in the study. .

The team of Dr. Goldaire found that patients over 80 years of age were 20 times more likely to die from Coruna than those in their fifties, and hundreds of times those under the age of 40.

Men who were infected with the virus are more likely to die than women of the same age, in addition to medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes, severe asthma and weak immunity, all of which are consistent with research in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States.

The researchers note that a person's chances of death also tend to track social and economic factors such as poverty.

Avon Connor, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study, explained that the data roughly reflects what was observed around the world and is not necessarily surprising, stressing that seeing these patterns appear in a large data set is “amazing” and “adds another layer of imaging from They are in danger "during this epidemic.

The epidemiologist at Drexel University, Charles Barber, stated that the results of the study on race were particularly convincing.

The researchers found that black and South Asian coronaviruses were more likely to die than white patients, and this trend continued even after Dr. Goldaker and his colleagues made statistical adjustments to account for factors such as age, gender and medical conditions.

An increasing number of reports indicated that the widespread social and structural disparities that burden the ethnic minority groups around the world increase the risk of this virus.

On the other hand, some experts stressed that there were defects in the researchers' methodology that made it difficult to determine the exact risks faced by members of vulnerable groups identified in the study, for example, some medical conditions that could increase the risk of the virus, such as chronic heart disease, are more common Among black whites.

"Regardless of the methodological flaws of this study, experts agree that the causes of the disparity in incidence of any disease, whether Covid-19 or others, are closely related to racism," according to Dr. Mitchell, and continues: "In the United States, the Latin population is likely to be infected. African Americans are three times more likely to be infected with the virus than the white population.

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