Sero-surveillance of COVID-19 in England

Gayatri Amirthalingam (Public Health England, UK)

14:00 - 14:30 Thursday 29 April Afternoon

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Session overview

Control of COVID-19 requires the ability to detect asymptomatic and mild infections, that would not present to healthcare, to determine the true number of infections within the general population. This number is required to understand transmission, to inform control measures such as social distancing and vaccination and to provide a denominator for the estimation of severity measures such as infection fatality and infection hospitalisation ratios. This information can be derived through serological surveys. In England, Public Health England established a range of serum collections to evaluate seroprevalence over time and assess the impact of vaccination. This includes (1) healthy adult blood donor samples (2) samples from patients presenting to primary care for routine blood testing and (3) residual samples from participating hospital laboratories across all age groups. Several immunoassays for the detection of anti-SARS-COV-2 antibodies have been developed using different targets. Currently available vaccines in the UK are based on the spike protein. Nucleoprotein (N) assays only detect antibodies post natural infection, whereas spike (S) assays will detect both post natural infection and vaccine-induced antibodies. Thus, using an approach of dual testing samples using N and S assays allows assessment of the impact of the vaccine programme in the population. In this presentation, the results from a range of serological surveys will be presented which has supported the national evaluation of the vaccine programme in England.

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