MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit

• Ethnic and socioeconomic differences in SARS-CoV-2 infection: prospective cohort study using UK Biobank (published in BMC Medicine). This study found that black and south Asian ethnic groups have a higher risk of testing positive with SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19. These groups were also at a higher risk of testing positive while attending hospital, suggesting they were also at greater risk of severe disease from the virus. This higher risk was not accounted for by differences in socioeconomic conditions, self-reported health or behavioural risk factors.
• Mitigating the wider health effects of Covid-19 pandemic response (published in the BMJ). Health inequalities are likely to widen without action to support those most vulnerable to the effects of social distancing measures. These effects have numerous mechanisms, including economic, social, health related behaviours, and disruption to services and education.
• Vitamin D concentrations and COVID-19 infection in UK Biobank (published in Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research & Reviews). The findings do not support a potential link between vitamin D concentrations and risk of COVID-19 infection, nor that vitamin D concentration may explain ethnic differences in COVID-19 infection.
• Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic groups in England are at increased risk of death from COVID-19: indirect standardisation of NHS mortality data (published in Wellcome Open Research). BAME people are at increased risk of death from COVID-19 even after adjusting for geographical region, but was limited by the lack of data on deaths outside of NHS settings and ethnicity denominator data being based on the 2011 census. Despite these limitations, there is an urgent need to take action to reduce the risk of death for BAME groups and better understand why some ethnic groups experience greater risk. 

• Impact of school closures on socioeconomic inequalities in children's wellbeing and development, led by Peter Craig.

Over 100 countries, including the UK, have closed schools as part of their social distancing measures during the coronavirus pandemic. A possibly severe unintended consequence of school closures is a widening of educational inequalities, with implications for health inequalities down the line. Research in countries with a long summer break suggests that differential attainment losses account for a substantial fraction of total educational inequalities. Although UK schools have a relatively short summer holiday, the COVID-19 related closures will lead to (at least) a 3-4 month break from classroom teaching for most children, and a partial return after that.

A range of surveys in the UK have reported widely varying levels of support for home schooling between pupils at private and publicly-funded schools, and between schools within the public sector.

The suspension of much education testing and survey fieldwork will make impacts difficult to measure directly, but it may be possible to get useful insights into possible consequences from existing data. Our study includes  (1) a rapid scoping review of the international evidence of differential attainment loss; (2) analysis of cognitive and social development measures for 5, 7, 11 and 13 year olds in the Millennium Cohort Study to identify whether disparities (e.g. by parental income or education) widen between the last month prior to the summer break and the first month after, and whether the pattern changes as children get older.

Read our consultation response to the UK Parliament Education Committee on the effects of school closures during the pandemic.

• Assessing policy to address the medium-run impact of COVID-19 on income and health inequality with models informed by the history of disease outbreaks. Rebecca Mancy (Co-I. PI is Konstantinos Angelopoulos)  

This project will model the evolution of inequalities in income, wealth and health following COVID-19, as informed by historical disease outbreaks, and use the models developed to assess mitigation policies. We will develop models of income, wealth and health inequality in the UK. Our models will be used to examine the effects of tax and benefits policies, as well as public health interventions, therefore informing a better policy response to the inequality impacts of COVID-19. This grant is funded by ESRC as part of UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response to COVID-19.

• Investigating incidence, severity and risk factors for COVID-19 in BAME and Migrant groups to inform public health action. Vittal Katikireddi (Co-I. PI Rob Aldridge, UCL)  

This project aims to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on minority ethnic and migrant groups and how to tackle it in community settings. The study will build on ‘Virus Watch’, which was previously funded by UKRI and NIHR to study 25,000 individuals across the country in a nationally representative household cohort to monitor spread of the novel coronavirus across England. This funding will enable the recruitment of approximately 12,000 more people from minority ethnic and migrant groups. Their symptoms will be followed over time and subsets of participants will receive antigen and antibody tests and they will study factors such as household transmission, occupation, co-morbidities, healthcare usage, and mental health and economic impacts. Separately, the project also utilise the Million Migrant Cohort study of healthcare and mortality outcomes in non-EU migrants and refugees to England since 2015. In collaboration with Public Health England, the team will link this with data on COVID-19 diagnosis and hospitalisation to determine how often these groups are diagnosed, hospitalised and die with COVID-19 and how this is affected by their socioeconomic situation and pre-existing health conditions. Read the news story on UKRI website: Multimillion investment in six new research projects to investigate COVID-19 and ethnicity.

• The Schools Health and Wellbeing Improvement Research Network (SHINE) have developed resources to help schools, their students and parents with their response to COVID-19. Visit the SHINE website to download these resources.
• Generation Scotland has launched a CovidLife survey to understand the psychological, social and economic impacts of COVID-19. SHINE is working with Generation Scotland to develop a TeenCovidLife survey for 12-17 years olds to see how COVID-19 is affecting their health and wellbeing, social and home life.
• The Transdisciplinary Research for the Improvement of Youth Mental Public Health (TRIUMPH) Network has created a COVID-19 hub with links to organisations who can offer information, mental health advice and support to children and young people, parents/carers, and others involved in supporting young people at this time. You can also read the latest evidence about the impact of COVID-19 on young people’s mental health. The TRIUMPH Network are also collaborating with Oxford Centre for Emotions and Affective Disorders on the Oxford ARC Study. This UK-wide study investigates resilience and how adolescents and their parents/carers are coping with social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, with weekly updates from the study published on the study website.
• Ruth Dundas and Alastair Leyland have written a blog contrasting government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and inequality in the UK. While taking urgent and radical action according to the precautionary principle is entirely appropriate to address the pandemic, they argue that the inequalities challenge is at least as important and thereby should demand a similar urgency and seriousness of response. 
• Umberto Gostoli and Eric Silverman have written a public letter ‘Sound behavioural theories, not data, is what makes computational models useful’ published in Review of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. 
• Carrie Purcell published an opinion piece on the IRESH website on how access to abortion might be supported during Covid-19.
• Whilst undertaking PhD research, Amrit Purba has written two articles published in Nursing Times discussing a number of approaches which could be adopted to reduce the baseline demand on the NHS and flatten the curve: ‘Enhance the NHS nursing workforce’s contribution to tackle COVID-19’ and 'How should the role of the nurse change in response to COVID-19?'
• Rod Taylor and Carrie Purcell have written a correspondence to the European Journal of Preventative Cardiology on the need to maintain access to cardiac rehabilitation during COVID-19.
• Vittal Katikireddi and IHW's Claire Niedzwiedz have published a piece in the Conversation on why black and Asian people are at greater risk of COVID-19.
• Ruth Dundas is part of The Scottish COVID-19 Response Consortium (SCRC) - a group of epidemiologists, mathematical modellers, data scientists, software developers and other scientists that have come together to develop new models to help inform the control of COVID-19.
• Eric Silverman is a member of Covid-19 Healthcare Coalition which is developing a decision-support dashboard intended to help policy-makers in the US to monitor the progress of the pandemic at the state and county level throughout the country.
• Our Clinical Research Fellow and PhD student Rachel Thomson has written a blog on her experience stepping back from academia into clinical public health during the COVID-10 pandemic.
• Public Health Scotland has published a briefing looking at protecting the health of the working-age population as lockdown reduces. Vittal Katikireddi, Peter Craig, Theocharis Kromydas and Rachel Thomson are members of the working group behind this briefing.
• Christina McMellon and Alice Maclachlan from TRIUMPH Network have contributed to The Alternative Children’s Rights Impact Assessment (CRIA) on COVID-19 related policy impacting on Scotland’s children and young people. This is an independent assessment of the children’s human rights implications of legislation and policies addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Vittal Katikireddi took part in a BMJ and Independent SAGE public discussion on 7th July, chaired by Fiona Godlee, Editor in chief of The BMJ, asking: Can the British Isles achieve zero Covid-19? 
• Rich Mitchell and Jonathan Olsen are on Public Health Scotland's Social and System Recovery: Environments and Spaces Group. Rich is leading their Evidence and Data subgroup. The group is currently exploring the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for open spaces, parks, streets, public spaces.