Estimates of the prevalence of self-reported long COVID and associated activity limitation, using UK Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey data. Experimental Statistics.

The UK Government has been holding daily press briefings in order to provide updates on the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and outline any new measures being put in place to deal with the outbreak. Boris Johnson announced that the UK would be going into lockdown in a broadcast on March 23 which was watched live by more than half of the respondents to a daily survey. On June 28, just ** percent of respondents said they had not watched or read about the previous day's briefing. For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) Press Briefings Corpus is a work in progress to collect and present in a machine readable text dataset of the daily briefings from around the world by government authorities. During the peak of the pandemic, most countries around the world informed their citizens of the status of the pandemic (usually involving an update on the number of infection cases, number of deaths) and other policy-oriented decisions about dealing with the health crisis, such as advice about what to do to reduce the spread of the epidemic.

Usually daily briefings did not occur on a Sunday.

At the moment the dataset includes:

UK/England: Daily Press Briefings by UK Government between 12 March 2020 - 01 June 2020 (70 briefings in total)

Scotland: Daily Press Briefings by Scottish Government between 3 March 2020 - 01 June 2020 (76 briefings in total)

Wales: Daily Press Briefings by Welsh Government between 23 March 2020 - 01 June 2020 (56 briefings in total)

Northern Ireland: Daily Press Briefings by N. Ireland Assembly between 23 March 2020 - 01 June 2020 (56 briefings in total)

World Health Organisation: Press Briefings occuring usually every 2 days between 22 January 2020 - 01 June 2020 (63 briefings in total)

More countries will be added in due course, and we will be keeping this updated to cover the latest daily briefings available.

The corpus is compiled to allow for further automated political discourse analysis (classification).

Estimates to understand the potential impact of long COVID on adults in Great Britain between April and June 2021, including estimates by age, sex, disability, and deprivation. Analysis based on the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey.

This study set out to investigate, using qualitative methodology, the experiences of spouses of people with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) during the coronavirus pandemic, with particular focus on spouse distress and cognitive and behavioral change in people with ALS (pwALS). Qualitative semi-structured interviews of nine spouses of pwALS living in England were conducted between 11/09/2020 and 20/04/2021, focusing on spouses’ perspectives of how their lives and the lives of pwALS were affected by the pandemic and related lockdowns. Interviews were subject to thematic analysis. Four superordinate themes were identified from the spouses’ interviews: (i) pandemic behaviors, which encompassed accounts of cautious behavior, relaxation of cautious behavior, and other people’s attitudes to shielding the person with ALS; (ii) changes to daily life caused by the pandemic and progression of ALS; (iii) distress in spouses, which included anxiety, depression, and burden; and (iv) ALS-related behavioral impairment. Spouses also provided mixed accounts of telehealth care, pointing out its convenience but some felt that face-to-face appointments were preferable. While many reactions to the pandemic reported by spouses of pwALS may have been similar to those of the general population or other vulnerable groups, interviews indicated the potential for the pandemic to have made more apparent certain aspects of behavioral change in pwALS with which carers may require support. Clinicians need to acknowledge spouses’ concerns about the potential limitations of remote clinical consultations, enquire about cognitive and behavioral change, and consider how input should be best provided in such limiting circumstances.

Multilingual (EN, ES, FR, PT, IT, DE, KO, RU, ZH, UK, VI) COVID-19-related corpus acquired from the website (https://www.cdc.gov/) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of US government (11th August 2020). It contains 51202 TUs in total.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccination rates among adults who live in England, including estimates by socio-demographic characteristic and Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 2020

The way in which people report the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has affected their household finances in the past seven days, if people report their costs of living has changed in the last month and why, and people’s financial situation in the last month – indicators from the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN).

Based on a comparison of coronavirus deaths in 210 countries relative to their population, Peru had the most losses to COVID-19 up until July 13, 2022. As of the same date, the virus had infected over 557.8 million people worldwide, and the number of deaths had totaled more than 6.3 million. Note, however, that COVID-19 test rates can vary per country. Additionally, big differences show up between countries when combining the number of deaths against confirmed COVID-19 cases. The source seemingly does not differentiate between "the Wuhan strain" (2019-nCOV) of COVID-19, "the Kent mutation" (B.1.1.7) that appeared in the UK in late 2020, the 2021 Delta variant (B.1.617.2) from India or the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) from South Africa.

The difficulties of death figures

This table aims to provide a complete picture on the topic, but it very much relies on data that has become more difficult to compare. As the coronavirus pandemic developed across the world, countries already used different methods to count fatalities, and they sometimes changed them during the course of the pandemic. On April 16, for example, the Chinese city of Wuhan added a 50 percent increase in their death figures to account for community deaths. These deaths occurred outside of hospitals and went unaccounted for so far. The state of New York did something similar two days before, revising their figures with 3,700 new deaths as they started to include “assumed” coronavirus victims. The United Kingdom started counting deaths in care homes and private households on April 29, adjusting their number with about 5,000 new deaths (which were corrected lowered again by the same amount on August 18). This makes an already difficult comparison even more difficult. Belgium, for example, counts suspected coronavirus deaths in their figures, whereas other countries have not done that (yet). This means two things. First, it could have a big impact on both current as well as future figures. On April 16 already, UK health experts stated that if their numbers were corrected for community deaths like in Wuhan, the UK number would change from 205 to “above 300”. This is exactly what happened two weeks later. Second, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly which countries already have “revised” numbers (like Belgium, Wuhan or New York) and which ones do not. One work-around could be to look at (freely accessible) timelines that track the reported daily increase of deaths in certain countries. Several of these are available on our platform, such as for Belgium, Italy and Sweden. A sudden large increase might be an indicator that the domestic sources changed their methodology.

Where are these numbers coming from?

The numbers shown here were collected by Johns Hopkins University, a source that manually checks the data with domestic health authorities. For the majority of countries, this is from national authorities. In some cases, like China, the United States, Canada or Australia, city reports or other various state authorities were consulted. In this statistic, these separately reported numbers were put together. For more information or other freely accessible content, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

Bilingual (EN-UK) COVID-19-related corpus acquired from the portal (https://www.gov.pl/) of the Polish Government (8th May 2020)

Multilingual (EN, AR, ES, FA, FR, IT, KO, PT, RU, TL, TR, UK, UR, VI, ZH) corpus acquired from the website https://usahello.org/, a free online center for information and education for refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and welcoming communities (9th August 2020). It contains 41165 TUs in total.

Multilingual (EN, PL, RU, UK) corpus acquired from the website (https://udsc.gov.pl/) of the Polish Office for Foreigners. It contains 864 TUs in total.

[!NOTE] Dataset origin: https://live.european-language-grid.eu/catalogue/corpus/21340

  Description

Multilingual (EN, ES, FR, PT, IT, DE, KO, RU, ZH, UK, VI) COVID-19-related corpus acquired from the website (https://www.cdc.gov/) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of US government (11th August 2020). It contains 51202 TUs in total.

  Citation

COVID-19 CDC dataset v2. Multilingual (EN, ES, FR, PT, IT, DE, KO, RU, ZH, UK, VI) (2020, August 16). Version 2.0.… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/FrancophonIA/COVID-19_CDC.

The data source for this dataset is the NI Vaccine Management System (VMS). VMS holds vaccination reports for COVID-19 and influenza vaccines which were either administered in NI or to NI residents. This dataset is an aggregated summary of COVID-19 vaccinations recorded in VMS. It is effectively a day-by-day count of living people vaccinated by dose, age band (on the day that the dataset was extracted from VMS) and LGD of residence. Aggregated summary data from VMS is published daily to the NI COVID-19 Vaccinations Dashboard. This dataset is updated weekly and allows NI vaccination coverage to be included in the GOV.UK Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK dashboard.

[!NOTE] Dataset origin: https://live.european-language-grid.eu/catalogue/corpus/21101

  Description

Multilingual (EN, PL, FR, DE, VI, RU, UK) COVID-19-related corpus acquired from the portal (https://www.gov.pl/) of the Polish Government (8th May 2020). It contains 1447 TUs in total.

  Citation

COVID-19 POLISH-GOV v2 dataset. Multilingual (EN, PL, FR, DE, VI, RU, UK) (2020, May 09). Version 2.0. [Dataset (Text corpus)]. Source: European Language Grid.… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/FrancophonIA/COVID-19_POLISH-GOVv2.

The Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) and the MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing (LHA) have carried out two online surveys of the participants of five national longitudinal cohort studies which have collected insights into the lives of study participants including their physical and mental health and wellbeing, family and relationships, education, work, and finances during the coronavirus pandemic. The Wave 1 Survey was carried out at the height of lockdown restrictions in May 2020 and focussed mainly on how participants’ lives had changed from just before the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020 until then. The Wave 2 survey was conducted in September/October 2020 and focussed on the period between the easing of restrictions in June through the summer into the autumn. A third wave of the survey was conducted in early 2021.

In addition, CLS study members who had participated in any of the three COVID-19 Surveys were invited to provide a finger-prick blood sample to be analysed for COVID-19 antibodies. Those who agreed were sent a blood sample collection kit and were asked to post back the sample to a laboratory for analysis. The antibody test results and initial short survey responses are included in a single dataset, the COVID-19 Antibody Testing in the National Child Development Study, 1970 British Cohort Study, Next Steps and Millennium Cohort Study, 2021 (SN 8823).

The CLS studies are:

• Millennium Cohort Study (born 2000-02) both cohort members and parents (MCS)
• Next Steps (born 1989-90) (NS)
• 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70)
• 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS).

The LHA study is:

• MRC National Survey of Health and Development, 1946 British birth cohort (NSHD)

The content of the MCS, NS, BCS70 and NCDS COVID-19 studies, including questions, topics and variables can be explored via the CLOSER Discovery website.

The COVID-19 Survey in Five National Longitudinal Cohort Studies: MRC National Survey of Health and Development, 2020: Special Licence Access contains the data from Waves 1-3 for the 1946 birth cohort study.

The Wave 1 Survey was programmed and administered by CLS/LHA using Qualtrics. The Wave 2 and Wave 3 Survey was programmed and administered by Kantar Public.

Further information may be found on the https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/covid-19-survey/"> CLS COVID-19 survey website.

Latest edition information

For the third edition (June 2021), the Wave 3 data have been added to the study, and the Wave 2 data file replaced with a new version. The documentation has also been updated.

Objectives: As the initial crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, healthcare decision makers are likely to want to make rational evidence-guided choices between the many interventions now available. We sought to update a systematic review to provide an up-to-date summary of the cost-effectiveness evidence regarding tests for SARS-CoV-2 and treatments for COVID-19.Methods: Key databases, including MEDLINE, EconLit and Embase, were searched on 3 July 2023, 2 years on from the first iteration of this review in July 2021. We also examined health technology assessment (HTA) reports and the citations of included studies and reviews. Peer-reviewed studies reporting full health economic evaluations of tests or treatments in English were included. Studies were quality assessed using an established checklist, and those with very serious limitations were excluded. Data from included studies were extracted into predefined tables.Results: The database search identified 8,287 unique records, of which 54 full texts were reviewed, 28 proceeded for quality assessment, and 15 were included. Three further studies were included through HTA sources and citation checking. Of the 18 studies ultimately included, 17 evaluated treatments including corticosteroids, antivirals and immunotherapies. In most studies, the comparator was standard care. Two studies in lower-income settings evaluated the cost effectiveness of rapid antigen tests and critical care provision. There were 17 modelling analyses and 1 trial-based evaluation.Conclusion: A large number of economic evaluations of interventions for COVID-19 have been published since July 2021. Their findings can help decision makers to prioritise between competing interventions, such as the repurposed antivirals and immunotherapies now available to treat COVID-19. However, some evidence gaps remain present, including head-to-head analyses, disease-specific utility values, and consideration of different disease variants.Systematic Review Registration: [https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42021272219], identifier [PROSPERO 2021 CRD42021272219].

Multilingual (EN, FR, DE, ES, EL, IT, PL, PT, RO, KO, RU, ZH, UK, VI, TA, TL) COVID-19-related corpus acquired from the website (https://www.canada.ca/) of the Government of Canada (17th July 2020). It contains 77606 TUs in total.

Bilingual (EN-UK) corpus acquired from the website (https://udsc.gov.pl/) of the Polish Office for Foreigners