Covid survey goes online

Will virus visibility suffer?

Every month I get a text from a woman called Pauline who works for a big market research company asking if I’m free for a visit the next day. If I say yes, she calls in the morning from her car parked outside my house and asks me a series of questions. Have I visited a hospital in the last month, how many times have I been to the shops, how many people have I been in close contact with, and so on. There are also lifestyle questions and we both laugh as I repeat for the nth time that no, I’ve never been a smoker unless you want to count the odd packet of Gauloises I bought in Paris as a student more than 40 years ago in a doomed attempt to appear cool.

Then she knocks on the door and hands me a Covid swab test kit which I complete in her presence and hand back. A few days later I get the test result - always negative so far - and a voucher for £25, reduced to £20 since April. I am one of hundreds of thousands of people going through this routine every month, as participants in what has been a vital weapon in tracking the pandemic, the Covid-19 Infection Survey conducted by the Office for National Statistics.

But last week, Pauline told me it was going to be her last visit. The ONS survey is being scaled back, the questionnaire will now be conducted online, and the test kits will be mailed out to participants who will be expected to complete them and pop them in the post back.

You can see why the cutbacks are happening - employing Pauline and hundreds of people like her was pretty costly. Then there was the £300 a year in vouchers they were giving each participant, though I hope the ONS had negotiated a good deal with the voucher suppliers because I know I ended up spending a lot more than £25 each time with the wine merchant I chose from the list of retailers. (I would have taken part in the survey without the bonus but I presume the ONS modellers must have calculated a financial incentive was necessary to achieve an accurate model of the population as a whole.)

A Freedom of Information request last year revealed that the annual cost to the taxpayer of the survey was around £390 million - presumably moving it online and getting participants to post the test back will mean a substantial cut in the cost.

But what will it mean for the accuracy of what is recognised internationally as one of the most effective means of tracking Covid-19’s spread? After all, the move comes just as we’re seeing a new wave of infections, with the latest figures from the survey showing 1 in 30 adults in England infected with the virus, as compared with 1 in 60 in late May.

The ONS insists that what it describes as a new “flexible” approach for participants will remain effective. The chief statistician Sir Ian Diamond said, “The representative sample of people we will continue to test has been carefully designed to track the virus and monitor antibody levels in communities across the UK, efficiently and effectively, as everyone learns to live with COVID-19.”

Of course, the ONS had little option but to make this move - it had seemed that the government was on the verge of scrapping the survey altogether and this was a way of keeping it going in some form.

But it appears almost certain that fewer people will take part when they are required to remember first to do the test, then to put it in the post, rather than just wait for a knock on the door - adding any friction to a process like this makes it less attractive. The worry must be that the government will end up with a fuzzier picture just as a new variant demands a new policy approach to Covid-19.

But if the ONS is right, and the survey continues to track the virus “efficiently and effectively” then that begs another question - were huge amounts of money wasted over the last two years when the whole operation could have been carried out more cheaply online and via the post from the start?