EpiCov

Summary

COVID-19 is a novel infectious disease caused by a virus related to those which caused previous outbreaks of SARS and MERs. Most infected people have no or only mild symptoms, but a significant fraction suffer from severe lung and breathing symptoms or other severe health problems which need to be treated in hospital. These patients must stay in COVID-19 specific wards to prevent them from infecting other patients. Measurements from some standard blood tests frequently performed in NHS hospitals have been shown to contain information which may be useful to distinguish between patients with COVID-19 and patients with diseases with similar symptoms. Standard tests also seem to contain information that is useful for predicting the course of the disease in COVID-19 infected patients. We have developed an algorithm that attempts to use these standard hospital tests and medical records to:

1. Determine whether a patient is infected with COVID-19

2. Predict the expected course of a COVID-19 patient's disease.

These inferences will be useful to triage patients into wards on admission and to identify which patients are likely to need which treatments. We seek access to NIHR BioResource data to understand how measurements from standard hospital tests vary in healthy people and people with rare diseases. This will help us to identify useful signatures in COVID-19 infected individuals.