Health Data Research UK, Office for National Statistics and UK Research and Innovation are to fund 12 COVID-19 data research initiatives.
The projects will use national data to hopefully answer some key COVID-19 related research questions.
The researchers will explore the effectives of COVID-19 vaccines, ‘long COVID’ and there will be a national study to understand differences in susceptibility and risk factors between ethnic groups. Another will use linked datasets to understand transmission of COVID-19 in schools.
The 12 projects will join the study in January and will be expected to complete by the end of June 2021.
The projects are:
Irene Higginson, King’s College London
Area of focus: palliative care
Research questions to be addressed: What is the relationship between regional COVID-19 palliative care responses and COVID-19 prevalence, mortality, admissions, discharges; business / social impacts?
Till Hoffmann, Imperial College London
Area of focus: surveillance and epidemiology
Research questions to be addressed: How can National Core Studies healthcare data be connected with wastewater surveillance of COVID-19 in a privacy-preserving fashion to inform epidemiological models and democratise data access?
Trisha Greenhalgh, University of Oxford
Area of focus: long-COVID
Research questions to be addressed: Can phenotypes developed from enhanced remote primary care assessment of COVID-19 be used to identify a cohort of community cases, and enable comparison of recovered and long COVID?
Kevin Wyche, University of Brighton
Area of focus: transmission and environment
Research questions to be addressed: Is exposure to airborne fine and ultrafine particulate matter a determining factor in COVID-19 infection and outcome within the UK?
Paul Elliott, Imperial College London
Area of focus: surveillance and epidemiology
Research questions to be addressed: Characterise and quantify the biological, social and environmental drivers of medium-term health outcomes following infection with SARS-CoV-2.
Aziz Sheikh, University of Edinburgh
Area of focus: vaccines
Research questions to be addressed: Can we enable harmonised, near real-time, data on pharmacovigilance of COVID-19 vaccines using routinely collected linked national datasets across the UK?
Andrew Hayward, UCL
Area of focus: transmission & environment
Research questions to be addressed: What are the relative contributions of different exposures and settings to COVID-19 community transmission?
Kamlesh Khunti & Professor Tom Yates, University of Leicester
Area of focus: ethnicity
Research questions to be addressed: What are the key risk factors, effect modifiers and mediators of the excess risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and the associated complications of COVID-19 in minority ethnic communities using national linked datasets?
Rachel Denholm, University of Bristol
Area of focus: transmission & environment
Research questions to be addressed: 1. How do school COVID-19 transmission dynamics differ across studies? 2. Do children experience long-COVID? 3. Do COVID-19 outcomes differ for those with/without symptoms? 4. How common is COVID reinfection?
Julia Hippisley-Cox, University of Oxford
Area of focus: vaccines
Research questions to be addressed: What is the uptake and comparative safety of new COVID vaccines by age, sex, region, ethnicity, comorbidities, medication, deprivation, risk level and evidence of prior COVID infection?
Stephen Machin, London School of Economics
Area of focus: economy
Research questions to be addressed: Economic scarring from the COVID-19 induced crisis: monitoring inequality in economic and education outcomes.
Tracey Warren, University of Nottingham
Area of focus: employment
Research questions to be addressed: How is COVID-19 impacting women and men’s working lives in the UK?
