On the 16th February NHS England added 1.7 million more people to the government’s Covid-19 shielding list in England because of a new algorithm that factored in people’s socioeconomic conditions and underlying health problems for the first time.
NHS England have used QCovid to develop the COVID-19 Population Risk Assessment. This combines a number of factors such as age, sex registered at birth, ethnicity, body mass index (BMI) and specific health conditions and treatments to estimate the risk of a person catching coronavirus and becoming seriously unwell.
Therefore your shielding status may have changed and you may receive a letter that has been directly sent, centrally, from the NHS advising you to shield.
This does not mean you were missed from the list last year. This is an updated list based on new evidence.
Unfortunately we have noticed the QCovid Risk Assessment tool being used by NHS England has incorrectly added a number of our patients onto the shielding list. We are in the process of contacting anyone wrongly labelled as shielding by this tool.
If you do not think you should be shielding, please contact the surgery and we will try to explain why the government has sent you a shielding letter.