Background: Risk for COVID-19 positivity and hospitalization due to diverse environmental and sociodemographic factors may change as the pandemic progresses.
Methods: We investigated the association of 360 exposures sampled before COVID-19 outcomes for participants in the UK Biobank, including 9268 and 38,837 non-overlapping participants, sampled at July 17, 2020 and February 2, 2021, respectively. The 360 exposures included clinical biomarkers (e.g., BMI), health indicators (e.g., doctor-diagnosed diabetes), and environmental/behavioral variables (e.g., air pollution) measured 10-14 years before the COVID-19 time periods.
Results: Here we show, for example, "participant having son and/or daughter in household" was associated with an increase in incidence from 20% to 32% (risk difference of 12%) between timepoints. Furthermore, we find age to be increasingly associated with COVID-19 positivity over time from Risk Ratio [RR] (per 10-year age increase) of 0.81 to 0.6 (hospitalization RR from 1.18 to 2.63, respectively).
Conclusions: Our data-driven approach demonstrates that time of pandemic plays a role in identifying risk factors associated with positivity and hospitalization.
Social, demographic, and environmental factors have been shown to impact whether a person becomes infected following SARS-CoV-2 exposure. However, it is unclear whether the impact of different factors has changed as the pandemic has progressed. Here we analyze 360 factors and whether they are associated with the proportion of people being found to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 across two periods of time in the UK. Overall, we found that different risk factors were associated with testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection early in the pandemic compared to later in the pandemic. These results highlight that public health priorities should be adjusted as a consequence of changing risk and susceptibility to infection as the pandemic progresses.
© 2023. The Author(s).