Initial Results of a New Symptom Tracking App: About 10% of Britons Are Infected

Led by Professor Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s, TwinsUK is a scientific study of 15,000 identical and non-identical twins, which has been running for nearly three decades. Most already have taken part in comprehensive genetic analysis and immune profiling, as well as detailed gut microbiome profiling. At least 5,000 members of the existing twin cohort and their families are expected to sign up for this new study.

The free monitoring app has been developed as a partnership between researchers at King’s and health data science company ZOE - itself a spin-out from King’s - and will be widely available to health staff and the general public who wish to contribute to this research. It will also be used by other large population studies in the U.K. and the United States.

Spector said: “These are worrying times for everyone. Our twins are fantastically committed, enthusiastic health research participants who have already been studied in unprecedented detail, putting us in a unique position to provide vital answers to support the global fight against COVID-19. The more of the public that also use the app, the better the real-time data we will have to combat the outbreak in this country.”

Kings notes that the TwinsUK COVID-19 research study is funded by King’s College London, ZOE Global Ltd, the CDRF charity, and the National Institute of Health Research Guy’s and St Thomas’ Biomedical Research Center. Any data gathered from the app and study will be used strictly for public health or academic research and will not be used commercially or sold.

The free app can be downloaded at the app store.

Public Monitoring
Reacting to the initial results obtained from the 650,000 Britons who downloaded the app, Spector said: “From the initial responses so far around 10 percent of people are reporting symptoms associated with Covid-19, although many of these are mild.

If after we analyze the results and separate out the unrelated from related symptoms we could find that a large proportion of the population could have been affected, possibly millions.

The larger the dataset the better we can separate out the milder effects of the virus.”

Scientists are not sure whether the initial results are reflective of the rate of infection throughout the United Kingdom, but if they are, it means that about 6.5 million Britons are infected.

At the moment, there is no alternative system,” Spector told the Telegraph. he said. “I would have expected an NHS or Government version, but there isn’t one. This could really help NHS planning, so you could see spots where there are lots of infections rather than just waiting for bombs to fall.

We will also be able to work out if some of the symptoms are real or not.”

Spector said he was amazed at the response and expected more than one million people to have registered by Thursday morning.

Although you can have problems of self-selection and bias, when you’ve got big data like this you tend to trust it more. What we’re seeing is a lot of mild symptoms, so I think having this data should help people relax a bit more and stop seeing it as an all or nothing Black Death situation.

Other symptoms are cropping up. Thousands of people are coming forward to say they have loss of taste, and we may start to see clusters of symptoms.”

On Wednesday, Public Health England (PHE) promised that antibody tests which tell people if they have had the virus  and are now immune, will soon be available to the public, and King’s is planning to update the app so people can input their results.