Coronavirus: Research

(asked on 9th September 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department is taking to support research into covid-19 and respiratory conditions caused by air pollution.


Answered by
Amanda Solloway Portrait
Amanda Solloway
Government Whip, Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury
This question was answered on 14th September 2020

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), in partnership with the Department of Health and Social Care, has provided research funding for programmes looking into the factors that contribute to the severity of Covid-19 cases. This includes £4.9m funding to the ISARIC consortium for research and provision of real time information into the factors, including existing respiratory conditions, that put people most at risk of developing severe hospitalised illness as a result of Covid-19; and £1m to OpenSAFELY, a secure platform linking the primary care NHS records of 24 million patients, which is able to identify patients at higher risk of admission, ventilation and death from Covid-19.

UKRI’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) provides a national capability in air pollution research that underpins ongoing evaluations of the potential relationship between long-term air pollution exposure, respiratory conditions and COVID-19 symptoms and mortality. UKRI has also funded or repurposed at least 12 research projects studying the links between Covid-19 and air quality.

Through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the Department of Health and Social Care funds 14 Health Protection Research Units (HPRUs), which are research partnerships between universities and Public Health England (PHE). One of these Units, the NIHR HPRU in Environmental Exposures and Health based at Imperial College London, undertakes research on the health effects associated with exposure to a range of environmental pollutants. This includes research to investigate possible links between air pollution and COVID-19. Further information on projects on COVID-19 that are underway at the Unit can be found here: https://eeh.hpru.nihr.ac.uk/covid-19-projects/.

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