The epidemiological impact of the NHS COVID-19 App - Nature.com

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen digital contact tracing emerge around the world to help prevent spread of the disease. A mobile phone app records proximity events between app users, and when a user tests positive for COVID-19, their recent contacts can be notified instantly. Theoretical evidence has supported this new public health intervention^1–6, but its epidemiological impact has remained uncertain⁷. Here we investigated the impact of the NHS COVID-19 app for England and Wales, from its launch on 24 September 2020 through to the end of December 2020. It was used regularly by approximately 16.5 million users (28% of the total population), and sent approximately 1.7 million exposure notifications: 4.4 per index case consenting to contact tracing. We estimated that the fraction of app-notified individuals subsequently showing symptoms and testing positive (the secondary attack rate, SAR) was 6.0%, comparable to the SAR for manually traced close contacts. We estimated the number of cases averted by the app using two complementary approaches. Modelling based on the notifications and SAR gave 284,000 (108,000-450,000), and statistical comparison of matched neighbouring local authorities gave 594,000 (317,000-914,000). Roughly one case was averted for each case consenting to notification of their contacts. We estimated that for every percentage point increase in app users, the number of cases can be reduced by 0.8% (modelling) or 2.3% (statistical analysis). These findings provide evidence for continued development and deployment of such apps in populations that are awaiting full protection from vaccines.

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1. These authors contributed equally: Chris Wymant, Luca Ferretti

Affiliations

1. Big Data Institute, Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery, Nuffield Department for Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

   Chris Wymant, Luca Ferretti, Lucie Abeler-Dörner, David Bonsall, Robert Hinch, Michelle Kendall, Chris Holmes & Christophe Fraser

2. Zühlke Engineering Ltd., London, UK

   Daphne Tsallis

3. The Alan Turing Institute, London, UK

   Marcos Charalambides, Matthew Ayres, Chris Holmes & Mark Briers

4. Department of Statistics, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

   Michelle Kendall

5. Department of Economics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

   Luke Milsom

6. Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

   Chris Holmes

Authors

1. Chris Wymant
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2. Luca Ferretti
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3. Daphne Tsallis
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4. Marcos Charalambides
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5. Lucie Abeler-Dörner
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6. David Bonsall
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7. Robert Hinch
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8. Michelle Kendall
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9. Luke Milsom
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10. Matthew Ayres
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11. Chris Holmes
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12. Mark Briers
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13. Christophe Fraser
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christophe Fraser.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Information, including Supplementary Figures 1-3 and Supplementary Tables 1-4.

41586_2021_3606_MOESM2_ESM.pdf

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Wymant, C., Ferretti, L., Tsallis, D. et al. The epidemiological impact of the NHS COVID-19 App. Nature (2021). https://ift.tt/2RNR6KI

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• Received: 10 February 2021

• Accepted: 03 May 2021

• Published: 12 May 2021

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03606-z

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