Story By: Alex Cope, Sub Editor: Michael Leidig, Agency: Newsflash
A Liverpool University scientist has created a programme which calculates a person’s chances of dying from a coronavirus infection.
The program that crunched big data based on COVID-19 deaths from around the world can be used by everyone from companies looking to assess at risk workers who should stay home through to families and individuals.
Polish Dr Piotr Bandosz who is a researcher at the University of Liverpool was in charge of the project with a team from the Pomeranian Science and Technology Park in the city of Gdynia in northern Poland’s Pomeranian Voivodeship.
It is now available for use online at the following address https://vika.life/calculator but is going to be increasing in complexity and with the numbers of options available as time goes on.
The Medical doctor and PhD graduate Dr Bandosz says on his profile that he is in the University of Liverpool’s “Institute of population health sciences” and was a specialist on cardiovascular epidemiology in Poland before joining UoL.
Explaining how the calculator works, he said there was now enough data to give some idea of the risk of dying from coronavirus which depended on an individual’s lifestyle and underlying conditions.
The programme takes into account the user’s age, gender, and four key diseases and disorders: hypertension, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.
According to the calculator, a 50-year-old man with heart disease has a 6.36 percent risk of dying from COVID-19, while a woman with similar indicators is almost twice as safe.
Bandosz said: “The risk of dying from COVID clearly depends on your lifestyle and the diseases associated with it, including obesity, diabetes, hypertension and their complications. This relationship is very strong.”
Bandosz added that recent data shows that deaths among people with no chronic diseases account for less than 1 percent of overall deaths.
The creators said the programme is a preliminary version of the model and it will be “updated on a regular basis”.
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