Comparison of disparities in RSV, Influenza and COVID-19
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Comparison of disparities in RSV, Influenza and COVID-19: how burden is distributed by ethnicity, socioeconomic status, household size and composition
IRAS ID
340706
Contact name
Em Prestige
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 3 months, 1 days
Research summary
RSV, Influenza and COVID-19 are viruses which have been shown to disproportionately burden different groups. Studies with differing levels of generalisability have identified these disparities in various age brackets. In this investigation we aim to show how these disparities vary across age groups as well as how different viruses burden different groups across these ages. OpenSAFELY has been used in the past to identify such disparities in COVID-19, here we hope to determine how these disparities compare to both RSV and Influenza, as well as look at how these disparities evolved from 2016 to 2023 (and 2020 to 2023 for COVID-19). This investigation aims to discover similarities and differences in how these viruses burden groups, as well as how these burdens vary within individual viruses between ages.
The project will use the NHS England OpenSAFELY Research Service , which provides secure access to pseudonymised electronic health care records (EHR) in England. The service is deployed in general practice data managed by the GP system vendor TPP (~45% English population coverage), and is linked to out-patient, in-patient, and emergency hospital visits, death registry records, COVID-19 testing data, and various other health and demographic registries, and will be used for this project. Outputs are accessed by researchers as aggregated data with suppression of small numbers and rounding of counts in compliance with re-identification minimisation requirements for OpenSAFELY.
REC name
East Midlands - Nottingham 2 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
24/EM/0077
Date of REC Opinion
27 Mar 2024
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion