You might have seen the recent reports from Public Health England of a technical glitch that meant that thousands of people who had potentially been in contact with positive COVID-19 cases weren’t informed. Well we wanted to make it clear that this issue has had no impact on the COVID Symptom Study’s data and reporting.

The issue did not affect people receiving their results so our app users who had a test still received their results and logged those results in the app as normal.

Our systems are fully automated so all the results reported in the app are immediately fed into our data reports and considered in our estimates. As there was no issue with users receiving results, we have been totally unaffected.  

With this in mind, it is important to remind you that the COVID Symptom Study Infection Survey estimates the number of daily new COVID-19 positive cases in the UK based on swab test data received from users. Which, in short, means we take the swab test results you provide to us and the number of users who logged feeling unwell and then extrapolate those results to the wider population to give us an estimated figure of active cases. We are not providing the number of ‘confirmed cases’ like the government.

We hope you found this blog informative and useful.

Keep logging and keep safe!