Virus Watch: Understanding community incidence, symptom profiles, and transmission of COVID-19 in relation to population movement and behaviour.

This COVID-19 Rapid Response award is jointly funded (50:50) between the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health Research. The figure displayed is the total award amount of the two funders combined, with each partner contributing equally towards the project. COVID-19 is set to become a global pandemic. Near real time information is needed to inform NHS planning and public health response. This includes community incidence (regardless of seeking care), risk factors for disease, clinical symptoms, case hospitalisation and mortality ratios, asymptomatic viral shedding, asymptomatic infection, household transmission risk and population behaviours during periods of wellness and illness (including social contact and movement, respiratory hygiene and health seeking behaviours). This information can only be gathered accurately through large scale community studies. Our experience of the MRC/Wellcome FluWatch study and ESRC BugWatch study allows us to rapidly establish two six-month national household cohorts (April-September 2020) and (October 2020-March 2021) of 25,000 individuals each (2,500 in each region of England and Wales) for online symptom and behaviour reporting and optional use of an app allowing their mobile phones to be used as GPS trackers enabling secure transfer and analysis of detailed movement patterns. Two sub-cohorts (10,000 individuals each) will also self-swab when ill for detection of COVID-19 and other circulating viruses. We will also conduct a London based study (200 households) following household contacts of COVID-19 cases for 28 days with daily symptom reporting, regular swabbing and baseline and follow up serology to investigate household transmission and asymptomatic infection and virus shedding. We will use data from Virus Watch to train whole population prediction models based on social media and search engine data and develop spatiotemporal models. Findings will be rapidly disseminated via online dashboards informing the public and decision makers.