The plan to scrap the UK’s ONS Covid survey

Plans to scrap the Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) “gold standard” weekly Covid-19 survey have been greeted with dismay by experts and commentators.

The survey, which measures both infection rates and antibodies across the country, is due to lapse this spring and will be either “scaled back” or “phased out altogether” if Rishi Sunak does not sign off on funding for another year, the i reported.

But with experts warning that another pandemic is possible in the coming decades, ditching the scheme is being described as a short-sighted move that could prove counterproductive.

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‘Global standard setter’

The ONS weekly survey has been tracking the same households since June 2020 and is therefore not subject to fluctuations in numbers of people self-testing for Covid-19. It employs more than 2,000 people, who visit the same households regularly.

The survey, which has been praised by the World Health Organization, regularly tests around 100,000 people to provide an “unbiased estimate” of the prevalence of Covid in the UK, said The Times’ science editor Tom Whipple.

Unlike community testing, the survey is “not self-selecting, so it picks up people who would not get tested or who do not know they are infected”, he added.

With mass testing also expected to be scaled back, the daily case count published online will become less and less representative of the true number of infections. This, experts say, would make the ONS data increasingly valuable.

Wales’s economy minister, Vaughan Gething, told Times Radio that the ONS infection survey is “even more important now because of the changes made to testing policy in all parts of the UK”.

And former Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings tweeted that “abandoning” the “global standard setter” would be “so stupid”, claiming that the plan to scrap the scheme is a “Tory policy to save money”.

Professor Danny Altmann, an expert in immunology at Imperial College London, said it would be “incredibly counterproductive to axe” the survey, while Rupert Beale, clinical science group leader at the Francis Crick Institute, said it is a “flat-out terrible decision”.

Epidemiologist Adam Kucharski told the i it was “crucial to have good information on what’s happening”, and Christina Pagel of University College London said “we need ONS weekly population surveillance on Covid to combine with hospital and death data”.

In The Observer, columnist Will Hutton described the planned scrapping of the “highly regarded survey” as part of a “reckless libertarian dash” for the “Covid exit”.

With life increasingly returning to normal, the ONS study “allows the UK to pick up the emergence of high-risk variants”, he warned, describing the surveillance tracker as “public goods for which we readily pay”.

Future-proofing

The widely praised system could have future applications, said The Times’ Whipple, and marks the “greatest effort to track a disease in the history of humanity”.

With future funding, it could be that the ONS runs a “smaller – in both frequency and numbers – version of the survey” with a view to tracking other infections such as influenza.

Ian Diamond, the UK’s national statistician, told the paper that maintaining the infrastructure of the national survey could serve as an insurance policy, suggesting that if another novel virus emerged “it would have the ability to expand very, very quickly”.