Association of Chronic Acid Suppression and Social Determinants of Health with COVID-19 Infection (preprint)

Acid suppressants are a widely-used class of medications previously linked to an increased risk of aerodigestive infections. However, prior studies of these medications as potentially reversible risk factors for COVID-19 have been conflicting. We performed a case-control study involving clinician-abstracted data from 900 health records across 3 US medical centers. We incorporated sociobehavioral predictors of infectious exposure using geomapping to publicly-available data. We found no evidence for an association between chronic acid suppression and incident COVID-19 (adjusted odds ratio 1.04, 95% CI: 0.92-1.17, P =0.515). However, we identified several medical and social features as positive (Latinx ethnicity, BMI ≥ 30, dementia, public transportation use, month of the pandemic) and negative (female sex, concurrent solid tumor, alcohol use disorder) predictors of new-onset infection. These results place both medical and social factors on the same scale within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and underscore the importance of comprehensive models of disease.

CovidCounties - an interactive, real-time tracker of the COVID-19 pandemic at the level of US counties (preprint)

Management of the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be a significant challenge to policy makers. This is in large part due to uneven reporting and the absence of open-access visualization tools to present local trends and infer healthcare needs. Here we report the development of CovidCounties.org, an interactive web application that depicts daily disease trends at the level of US counties using time series plots and maps. This application is accompanied by a manually curated dataset that catalogs all major public policy actions made at the state-level, as well as technical validation of the primary data. Finally, the underlying code for the site is also provided as open source, enabling others to validate and learn from this work.