As some people have tried to explain, there’s ongoing work being done on all the data generated, and combinations of factors have been identified that raise your risk level.
Postcode is always going to be a blunt instrument - ours is flagged as being of low proportion of progression to higher education, which has provided some unexpected leniency with university offers to my undeprived children.
www.itv.com/news/2021-02-16/covid-17-million-more-people-told-to-shield-and-820000-moved-up-vaccine-priority-list
The new model, developed by New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) and Oxford University, looks at the conditions of people who caught coronavirus in the first wave and suffered negative outcomes or death.
The model considers a range of factors including age, ethnicity, body mass index (BMI), other health conditions and also postcode, which is indicative of levels of deprivation.
A letter to GPs from NHS England, seen by the Health Service Journal, said a "new data-driven risk assessment… has been developed to help identify people who may be at high risk from Covid-19. It has been used at a national level to help identify an additional group of patients with specific multiple risk factors which, combined, may put them at similar risk to those who are clinically extremely vulnerable to severe outcomes. As a precautionary measure, this group will now be added to the shielded patient list (SPL), on the advice of the chief medical officer."