A COVID-19 Risk Assessment for the US Labor Force

Sammantha Maher; Alexandra E Hill; Peter Britton; Eli P Fenichel; Peter Daszak; Carlos Zambrana-Torrelio; Jude Bayham

. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. comorbidities, questions about such conditions were not explicitly asked about in the NHIS survey. We included variables for conditions leading to and encompassed by the term "chronic respiratory diseases," including asthma, history of smoking, and lung cancer. 10 We pulled social and demographic variables in addition to health risk factors, including industry of employment, occupation, insurance coverage, ability to afford medical care, gender, and age. There is some evidence that male patients are significantly more likely to die from COVID-19 complications than female patients (21). Similarly, patients 40 years and over show an increasing risk of mortality, with patients aged 60 and over constituting the most at-risk group 15 (21,29). In the United States, it is possible that lack of health care coverage or perceived inability to afford care will prevent patients from seeking treatment early on, leading to complications later. As with the health variables, we err on the side of including a variable in the study for added flexibility in future analysis using our dataset.