Covid: Extra 1.

7m vulnerable added to
shielding list
There is to be a large expansion of the number of people being asked to shield in
England.

An extra 1.7 million people are expected to be added to the 2.3 million already on the list.
Half of the group have not yet been vaccinated so will now be prioritised urgently by their
local GPs. It comes after a new model was developed that takes into account extra factors
rather than just health. This calculation includes things such as ethnicity, deprivation (by
postcode) and weight to work out a person's risk of becoming seriously ill if they were to
catch Covid. It also looks at age, underlying health issues and prescribed medications.

Prof Andrew Hayward, a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats
Advisory Group (Nervtag), which has been involved in the modelling, said it considered a
"combination of factors" such as age, ethnicity and chronic illness and put them together to
reach a score.

He told BBC Radio 4's PM programme that this score could "more or less order people in the
population according to their level of risk" and "identify those at the top of that range to say,
'you should be prioritised for vaccine and you have a level of risk that is similar to those on
the shielding list'".

Until now, only those with specific conditions or undergoing certain types of treatment have
been advised to shield until 31 March. They include adults with Down's Syndrome, organ
donor recipients and people with severe respiratory conditions. The new model was developed
following work by Oxford University which looked at the characteristics of people who died
in the first wave to better understand risk. Medical records have been searched to identify
high-risk patients, based on their combined risk factors.

They are now being sent letters by the NHS informing of them of their new status, which
means they are entitled to statutory sick pay, prioritisation for online shopping slots and help
collecting medicines.

Major task for councils

Some local authorities with areas of high deprivation will now have a major task in contacting
people to check what support they need, according to the BBC's health editor Hugh Pym.

Cllr Neil Nerva, public health lead at Brent Council, in north-west London, told BBC News:
"We've got 17,000 people who are shielding. The news today means that over the next two
weeks we're going to be shielding another 12,000 people who are over 70 and another 12,000
who are under 70." He added: "That, I think, shows in very graphic terms the health
inequalities which exist in a borough like Brent."

Forrás: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56086965