Remote population surveillance for COVID-19 in the Fenland cohort
The speed at which coronavirus disease (COVID-19) spread around the world created a global health emergency. There arose an urgent need for studies to contribute to the understanding of how to mitigate the pandemic and to support decision-making during and after Covid. With the government enforced lockdown easing around the country, one of the key issues was how to avoid further waves of infection.
We used the Fenland Study cohort to measure how many people had evidence in their blood of previous infection with COVID-19 and then to investigate whether it was possible to identify the COVID-19 pre-symptomatic phase using measurements of signs and symptoms collected via a smartphone App to help scientists develop better measures of early detection.
We also sought to investigate how social distancing and the easing of restrictions impacted on other health-related outcomes such as diet and physical activity.
More about the Fenland COVID-19 study
We wanted to quantify the proportion of people who have had COVID-19 in the Fenland cohort as it’s broadly representative of the population of Cambridgeshire. This was a key unknown as testing during the first wave was initially limited to individuals admitted to hospital with COVID-19 symptoms. It has been suggested that between 10 to 100 times as many people may have truly been infected than official statistics suggest.
In this study, antibody testing was repeated at regular intervals so that we could see if those with a positive antibody status remained positive throughout the study period. The study was run between July 2020 to April 2021.
A real concern as restrictions were eased was the emergence of a second wave of infections. People are potentially infectious before they develop symptoms and the pre-symptomatic phase can be a driver of the spread of COVID-19. We believe the development of approaches to enable the early identification of new cases of infection in this pre-symptomatic phase would be hugely beneficial.
We partnered with Huma to research the potential of identifying people infected in the pre-symptomatic phase. We did this using information collected from individuals remotely, including measurements from devices, digital measurements on a phone, symptoms and potential COVID-19 risk factors. This study also aimed to measure the effect of the national COVID-19 restrictions including social distancing on health-related behaviours such as diet, physical activity, wellbeing and mental health during this period.
No single study on its own will be sufficient to understand risk factors for COVID-19 disease progression, and the Fenland COVID-19 study was designed to contribute to multi-study analyses to better understand and manage the COVID-19 pandemic.
Scientific research papers are still being published using the Fenland COVID-19 study data. You can see some of these research papers on the MRC Epidemiology Unit’s online publications database.
