Your country needs you — to sign up for a massive UK study to combat Covid-19.
Scientists want to recruit a Labs’ Army of at least 12,000 volunteers to help them find the vital clues that will lead to life-saving strategies to prevent and treat the deadly coronavirus.
Anyone over the age of 16 can take part in the ground-breaking Covidence-UK investigation. All you need is access to the internet, around an hour a month, and the determination to get behind this great British initiative.
It doesn’t matter where you live, whether you have already had Covid-19 symptoms, or if you have any other health problems such as diabetes and heart disease — your contribution could provide a crucial piece of the puzzle.
In fact, it is older people who already live with other health issues — and are at higher risk of becoming seriously ill with Covid-19 — who could hold the key to conquering the coronavirus.
Professor Adrian Martineau, a respiratory specialist based at Queen Mary University in London, who is heading the study explains: “There are so many big, unanswered questions about the coronavirus.
“We know older people, and people with certain long-standing conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure seem to be at increased risk — but we don’t know why. We know that women are less likely to die from coronavirus disease — but we don’t know why. And there is reason to believe some nutrients might be protective — but we don’t know if they really do make any difference.
“This study will provide answers to these and many other questions,” he says.
As its name suggests, Covidence-UK is mobilising a formidable team of scientists from six of the UK’s leading research organisations — Queen Mary University and King’s College London, the Universities of Edinburgh and Swansea, Queen’s University Belfast, and the world-renowned London School of Tropical Medicine.
And their expertise across immunology, respiratory medicine, women’s health and reproductive medicine, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, public health, clinical trials and health economics ensures every aspect of the pandemic will be put under the spotlight.
It is the massive scope of the study which gives it the power to find answers to the questions we are already asking and find the unexpected patterns and associations that could provide answers we can’t even imagine.
But to achieve this, the Covidence-UK team needs to enlist a massive army of data-detectives.
This science-by-numbers will enable the scientists to amass the volume of detailed information they need to identify which factors have a definite cause and effect on the coronavirus, and which apparent associations are purely coincidental.
For instance, several Chinese studies suggest that smokers are less likely to die from Covid-19 than non-smokers — an extraordinary finding given everything we know about the dangers of smoking.
However, there is another, far simpler explanation for this apparent link. On average smokers die 10 years before non-smokers, so most high-risk older patients will also be non- smokers. It’s also possible that smokers lied about their habit.
The study will shed light on why some young and seemingly healthy people — like 21-year-old Chloe Middleton — have died from the virus, while other supposedly high risk older ones — including 106-year-old Connie Titchen, who also survived the Spanish flu epidemic and two world wars — have defied the odds and beaten it.
The disproportionately high number of ethnic minority health workers who have died suggests that some groups are at higher risk of becoming seriously ill with coronavirus disease.
However, people from black and South Asian backgrounds are also two to four times more likely to develop diabetes than white Europeans — and this could contribute to their increased risk.
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Dr Sarah Finer, a senior lecturer in diabetes at Queen Mary University, London, and member of the Covidence-UK research team, says: “This is one of the really important early questions we need to answer. Age is a risk factor for both the coronavirus and diabetes, but we also know there is an increased chance of getting certain infections when you have type-2 diabetes.
“It’s really important for us to know whether Covid-19 is one of these infections, and if we get good numbers of people signing up for the study, we should get useful information quite quickly, and be able to feed that back to doctors caring for people with diabetes.”
If enough people join the Covidence-UK Labs’ Army, Professor Martineau says we should begin to see results within weeks. And, in the months to come, the database will provide a powerful springboard for ongoing research and new studies to test strategies which might prevent and treat the infection.
As the study is scheduled to run for five years, it will also provide an early warning system for any long-term damage such as reduced lung function, or a spike in Parkinson’s disease — as happened after the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19.
The more information the Covidence-UK researchers have, the more quickly they can eliminate the red-herring associations, and pinpoint the lifestyle factors that will save lives and arm us with the strategies we need to help lift the lockdown. Help them to help us, and sign up for the study here.
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