e-Article
Knowledge barriers in a national symptomatic-COVID-19 testing programme.
Document Type
article
Author
Mark S Graham; Anna May; Thomas Varsavsky; Carole H Sudre; Benjamin Murray; Kerstin Kläser; Michela Antonelli; Liane S Canas; Erika Molteni; Marc Modat; M Jorge Cardoso; David A Drew; Long H Nguyen; Benjamin Rader; Christina Hu; Joan Capdevila; Alexander Hammers; Andrew T Chan; Jonathan Wolf; John S Brownstein; Tim D Spector; Sebastien Ourselin; Claire J Steves; Christina M Astley
Source
PLOS Global Public Health, Vol 2, Iss 1, p e0000028 (2022)
Subject
Language
English
ISSN
2767-3375
Abstract
Symptomatic testing programmes are crucial to the COVID-19 pandemic response. We sought to examine United Kingdom (UK) testing rates amongst individuals with test-qualifying symptoms, and factors associated with not testing. We analysed a cohort of untested symptomatic app users (N = 1,237), nested in the Zoe COVID Symptom Study (Zoe, N = 4,394,948); and symptomatic respondents who wanted, but did not have a test (N = 1,956), drawn from a University of Maryland survey administered to Facebook users (The Global COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey [CTIS], N = 775,746). The proportion tested among individuals with incident test-qualifying symptoms rose from ~20% to ~75% from April to December 2020 in Zoe. Testing was lower with one vs more symptoms (72.9% vs 84.6% p