Also Read | How India has become an unequal republic- What has changed? - In mid-January, two separate studies by London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London were presented to Britain's New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG).They linked data from people who tested positive for the virus in the community -- rather than in hospital -- with death data and found a roughly 30 percent increase in the risk of death associated with the new strain.The groups used slightly different methods, but both matched people with the new variant to those with the older variants, taking into account other variables like age and location and controlling for hospitals being under pressure.Other studies.