CEB Modeling and Simulation Unit Seminar - Tracking the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in England: Two years of the REal-time Assessment of Community Transmission-1 (REACT-1) study

Oliver Eales

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic saw a greater level of viral surveillance and data collection than any previous pandemic. In many countries worldwide mass testing of the community was implemented only a few months after the pandemic had begun. However, although mass testing is highly effective as a public health tool, identifying infected individuals, it suffers many biases as a surveillance tool. Representative community surveys can avoid such biases and accurately measure infection prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, with fewer overall tests required. The REal-time Assessment of Community Transmission-1 (REACT-1) study tested randomly selected cross-sections of the population of England over 19 rounds that occurred approximately monthly from May 2020 to April 2022. This period of time saw the implementation and lifting of two national lockdowns, the rollout of a mass vaccination campaign, and the emergence of three variants of concern (Alpha, Delta, Omicron). Here we present some of the findings from two years of the REACT-1 study, focusing specifically on the temporal dynamics of prevalence and incidence, the changing relationships between prevalence and severe outcomes, and the competing dynamics between variants.

Bio: Oliver Eales is a research postgraduate at Imperial College London working alongside Steven Riley. The intended focus of his PhD was to model the evolutionary dynamics of influenza at multiple geographic scales, but COVID-19 had other plans. Since May 2020 Oliver has been the lead for the temporal and variant analysis of the REACT-1 study, a repeat cross-sectional study of SARS-CoV-2 prevalence in England.

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