QCovid: Personal Covid-19 risk calculator developed by Oxford University
qcovid.org
qcovid.org
I made my own covid mortality calculations last April, and was not scared off by my estimated odds, 1 in 350 per year. Using the linked UK calculator my odds were far better than I had estimated, about 1 in 16,000 per 90 days.
The activity calculator was interesting, also. I had heard that mask-to-mask interactions were based on an hour of nearness while indoors. I thought it to be an overreaction when people would wear masks outside and cross the street to avoid passing on the sidewalk.
So I looked up 10 people with no masks in a room, and it was a 1 in 200 chance per hour of catching covid given the odds of someone from my area being there who had it. Once again the risk was not as high I as thought it would be.
I'm curious what others think of the numbers from these calculators, especially those who find them alarming or surprising.
The Oxford calculator seems to be personally focused, and for me, that’s I what. Reading was relatively low risk. Seems to correlate with what I’ve read.
But the microcovid calc rated something I was previously accustomed to doing regularly as “high”. For me that wasn’t intuitively accurate. I guess for an immediate community of vulnerable or averse people, then high would be right. But not me personally.
Quite difficult to disentangle the personal from community risk. Likely to lead to risk averse behaviour. And that is fine, but only if the mitigation is accurately taken into account.
It seems unlikely that would have been done.
Specifically
> WHR has been shown to be a better predictor of cardiovascular disease than waist circumference and body-mass index.[11] However, other studies have found waist circumference, not WHR, to be a good indicator of cardiovascular risk factors,[12] body fat distribution,[13] and hypertension in type 2 diabetes.[14]
I would suspect the risk would be lessened for healthy sportsmen who are adequately rested.
This is probably the minority of athletes, though, so it might be a fringe case rather than something that should be taught as a norm. I also don't know how that relates to COVID.
BMI is accurate enough for a general population risk screening tool. We aren't dealing with precise numbers here anyway, just approximate ranges with significant differences between the results of various research studies.
On an individual level excess body fat is a critical risk factor for COVID-19.