Three days ago (4 May), I ‘celebrated’ a year working on the ONS Covid Infection Study (CIS) set up to gauge how widespread the virus is in the wider community.
Households volunteering to take part in the project are visited every week for five weeks and then once a month for a year at their homes to test for the presence of the virus, whether or not people have symptoms.
The results of the study are continually referred to in the government’s covid briefings and there’s a field force of some 2k (although this is a moving feast as the project has ramped up and down throughout the past year), of which I am one, working at the coalface visiting people on their doorstep providing the self-administered swabs and collecting data to help scientists better understand the spread of the virus.
When I first started, there were around 10k households just in England and we were literally given a two-hour training session and sent off into the wilderness. It would usually take around six to 10 months to launch a study of this magnitude in the field, but this was up and running in a matter of weeks. It was quite a phenomenal achievement and inevitably the project has evolved and protocols changed as we have moved forward.
As of 30 April 2021, 229,713 households throughout the UK were registered to take part in the study with 490,546 eligible individuals including children aged over two.
The latest figures, published on 30 April 2021, encouragingly shows the presence of covid decreasing in the wider community, largely attributed to both the vaccination programme and the latest lockdowns. Just one in 1,010 people in England are estimated to have covid or 0.10% of the population.
It is quite an incredible study and provides scientists with a host of insights since participants are asked a series of questions at each visit including how many people they have met up with and had physical contact with in the last seven days whilst demographics such as age, ethnicity and occupation are also captured.
The study now also asks questions on long covid providing additional information enabling statisticians to calculate around 1.1 million people in private households are suffering the effects of long covid.
Whilst the data is based on self-reported symptoms of long covid, it shows that of the 20,000 study participants who tested positive for Covid-19 between 26 April 2020 and 6 March 2021, 13.7% experienced symptoms for at least 12 weeks. It also revealed that the group most likely to suffer with long covid were women aged 25-34-years. So, don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a condition that adversely affects the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. And, I have met and spoke to a fair number of these people with one couple, in particular, who were both on ventilators in ICU last May, still struggling with the after effects now, which, when you speak to them, is very physically apparent, particularly in the shortness of breath.
This year the study was ramped up again with the introduction of a self-administered finger-prick test which consenting adults in invited households undertake on a regular basis to assess the prevalence of antibodies in the population either from vaccination or from having had covid. Eventually, 150,000 people will be taking part, currently up until April 2022, enabling scientists to track the efficacy of the vaccination programme over the long-term as well as providing transmission insights.
When schools first returned last year, the ONS together with Public Health England and the School of Tropical Medicine launched its schools covid infection study to ascertain the role schools play in the transmission of covid. We are currently working on Round 5 of the schools study whilst the results of Round 4 were published at the end of March and found just 0.34% of secondary school pupils from 14 local authorities taking part tested positive for covid, far lower than rounds 1 and 2 at 1.42% and 1.22% respectively. Meanwhile, the numbers testing positive in primary schools was so low in Round 4 that results were unquantifiable.
These studies continue to aid our understanding of Covid-19 infection rates and, now, the presence of antigens in the general population. Even though we don’t yet know enough about covid, it is how we know so much. If that makes sense.
Working on the ONS covid studies from a personal perspective, has kept the wolf from the door, something I have reiterated many times, but it has also been fascinating being a small cog in this vast wheel of such valuable data collection and for many of us, it is a privilege to be involved.
Drifting on By 