All Times EDT
Keywords: COVID-19, vaccination, risk calculator, data integration, community level risk
COVID-19 deaths continue to rise in the US and globally. Reducing COVID-19 burden for populations will require equitable and effective risk-based allocations of scarce preventive resources, including vaccinations. We develop a COVID-19 mortality risk calculator based on socio-demographic factors and pre-existing conditions for the US population by integrating information from the UK-based OpenSAFELY study with mortality rates by age and ethnicity across US states. We extend the tool to produce absolute risks in future times by combining information on pandemic dynamics at the community level. We combine the information on risk factor distribution from several publicly available national databases and apply the model to provide risk projections for the general adult population across 477 US cities and the Medicare population 65 years and older across 3,113 US counties. Validation analyses using 54,444 deaths from June 7 to October 1, 2020 show the model is well calibrated for the US population. Projections show that the model can identify relatively small fractions of the population (e.g. 4.3%) which might experience a disproportionately large number of deaths (e.g. 48.7%). Still, there is a wide variation in risk across communities. We provide a web-based risk calculator for individual level relative and absolute risks and interactive maps for viewing community-level risks.