UK Biobank (UKB) is an international health resource enabling research into the genetic and lifestyle determinants of common diseases of middle and older age. It comprises 500 000 participants. Public Health England’s Second Generation Surveillance System is a centralized microbiology database covering English clinical diagnostics laboratories that provides national surveillance of legally notifiable infections, bacterial isolations and antimicrobial resistance. We previously developed secure, pseudonymized, individual-level linkage of these systems. In this study, we implemented rapid dynamic linkage, which allows us to provide a regular feed of new COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) test results to UKB to facilitate rapid and urgent research into the epidemiological and human genetic risk factors for severe infection in the cohort. Here, we have characterized the first 1352 cases of COVID-19 in UKB participants, of whom 895 met our working definition of severe COVID-19 as inpatients hospitalized on or after 16 March 2020. We found that the incidence of severe COVID-19 among UKB cases was 27.4 % lower than the general population in England, although this difference varied significantly by age and sex. The total number of UKB cases could be estimated as 0.6 % of the publicly announced number of cases in England. We considered how increasing case numbers will affect the power of genome-wide association studies. This new dynamic linkage system has further potential to facilitate the investigation of other infections and the prospective collection of microbiological cultures to create a microbiological biobank (bugbank) for studying the interaction of environment, human and microbial genetics on infection in the UKB cohort.

中文翻译：

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英国公共卫生第二代监测系统和英国生物银行之间的 COVID-19 检测结果动态关联。


英国生物银行 (UKB) 是一个国际健康资源，可用于研究中老年常见疾病的遗传和生活方式决定因素。它有 500 000 名参与者。英国公共卫生第二代监测系统是一个集中的微生物学数据库，涵盖英国临床诊断实验室，提供对法定感染、细菌分离和抗菌素耐药性的全国监测。我们之前开发了这些系统的安全、假名、个人级别的链接。在这项研究中，我们实施了快速动态链接，这使我们能够定期向 UKB 提供新的 COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) 检测结果，以促进对重症的流行病学和人类遗传风险因素进行快速、紧急的研究。队列中的感染。在这里，我们对 UKB 参与者中的前 1352 例 COVID-19 病例进行了特征分析，其中 895 例符合我们对重症 COVID-19 的工作定义，即 2020 年 3 月 16 日或之后住院的住院患者。我们发现，重症 COVID-19 的发病率UKB 病例比英格兰一般人群低 27.4%，尽管这种差异因年龄和性别而异。 UKB 病例总数估计占英格兰公开公布病例数的 0.6%。我们考虑了病例数量的增加将如何影响全基因组关联研究的力量。这种新的动态链接系统具有进一步促进其他感染调查和微生物培养物前瞻性收集的潜力，以创建微生物生物库（bugbank），用于研究环境、人类和微生物遗传学对 UKB 队列感染的相互作用。