While it feels like we’re back to a pre-pandemic sense of normal, COVID continues to be an evolving virus, mutating into new variants that threaten the fragile stability of our current status quo. As the number of Omicron subvariants continue to multiply, reaching to BQ.1.1, a recombination of variants known as XBB.1.5 emerged in December and quickly went from representing 4% of the infections to 41%.1
Just as this virulent virus taught us from the beginning, real-time access to real-world data (RWD) is just as important as vaccines in the race to fight the infection. The advantage of RWD is that it provides for a superior understanding of disease spread, patterns and outbreaks so that proper resources and precautions can be utilized to prevent a second coming of the pandemic.
HealthVerity has been working with numerous government agencies since the beginning of the pandemic, assembling a pilot cohort of more than 3.2 million people with SARs-CoV-2 antibody tests for the National Cancer Institute and National Institutes of Health to conduct a study comparing infection rates. That COVID study was recently extended for a second time with ongoing research focusing on the impact of COVID on immunocompromised patients, the effectiveness of boosters, the prevalence of new variants, and patterns in infection and reinfection rates.
The original pilot COVID cohort that HealthVerity assembled has grown to include medical claims, lab data and vaccine status and now consists of nearly 200 million people.* It has been utilized by public health and life science organizations alike to conduct studies and analyses to help protect us against the evolving virus.
The HealthVerity COVID dataset has been used in over 20 published studies that report on various aspects of the disease, treatments and vaccines. We will continue to update our COVID cohort and work with government and pharma companies in the battle against this relentless foe.
Click here to learn more about the COVID cohort and see a demo.
1Goodman, Brenda. Omicron offshoot XBB.1.5 could drive new Covid-19 surge in US. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/03/health/covid-variant-xbb-explainer/index.html
* The HealthVerity COVID cohort includes those who have been diagnosed, tested, treated and/or had a symptom of COVID and, therefore, contains more individuals than reported cases.