Question reference: S5W-33465
- Asked by: Willie Rennie, MSP for North East Fife, Scottish Liberal Democrats
- Date lodged: 23 November 2020
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Current status: Answered by Jeane Freeman on 10 December 2020
Question
To ask the Scottish Government, further to it stating that response rates for the Coronavirus (COVID-19): ONS Infection Survey were "higher than initially expected", whether it will provide details of what this involved, and what implications this had for the operation of the survey.
Answer
Recruitment into the survey commenced in September, with letters inviting households to participate in the survey reaching the first Scottish households on 18 September. Field work started on 21 September, with survey teams starting to visit participant households from that date. The initial target for individuals swabbed per fortnight in Scotland was 15,000 with the aim of reaching this target as quickly as possible, and maintained within ±10% of this target. The timeframes for achieving this were based on registration data from the survey in England. In practice, these initial predictions on uptake in Scotland were underestimated and participant registration levels were significantly higher than those observed in England. Therefore, in order to not overshoot the target, recruitment was slowed down.
The increased number of participants recruited earlier in the study allowed more samples to be processed by an earlier date than expected, thus increasing the amount of data available and allowing analysis to be carried out sooner than anticipated for Scotland. It was originally planned that the first results for Scotland would be published on 6 November, however this was brought forward by two weeks to 23 October.