RSS President Professor Sylvia Richardson has written in support of keeping Covid surveys such as the ONS Covid Surveillance study, amid fears they could be scaled back.
A letter published in a the Guardian on 18 February 2022, written by Sylvia Richardson, stresses how important national surveillance studies have been in supporting decision-making throughout the pandemic. Simply relying on self-reported tests will likely cause bias, she points out, as it will be impossible to know how many people are reporting negative results or aren’t testing at all. Studies such as the ONS’s and React, she continues, helps us to estimate levels of infection in the population and to identify new variants of the virus.
Sylvia concludes: ‘Abrupt disruption of a surveillance system is wasteful, will make tracking of prevalence meaningless and will put in jeopardy the future health of the public. If important surveillance studies must be scaled down, this cannot be led by arbitrary cost-cutting targets, but should be led by statisticians to ensure that studies continue to provide reliable information.’
Read the letter in full.