Epidemiological impacts of the NHS COVID-19 app in England and Wales throughout its first year

Michelle Kendall (), Daphne Tsallis, Chris Wymant, Andrea Francia, Yakubu Balogun, Xavier Didelot, Luca Ferretti and Christophe Fraser
Additional contact information
Michelle Kendall: University of Warwick
Daphne Tsallis: Zühlke Engineering Ltd
Chris Wymant: Old Road Campus, University of Oxford
Andrea Francia: UK Health Security Agency, Nobel House
Yakubu Balogun: UK Health Security Agency, Nobel House
Xavier Didelot: University of Warwick
Luca Ferretti: Old Road Campus, University of Oxford
Christophe Fraser: Old Road Campus, University of Oxford

Nature Communications, 2023, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract The NHS COVID-19 app was launched in England and Wales in September 2020, with a Bluetooth-based contact tracing functionality designed to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2. We show that user engagement and the app’s epidemiological impacts varied according to changing social and epidemic characteristics throughout the app’s first year. We describe the interaction and complementarity of manual and digital contact tracing approaches. Results of our statistical analyses of anonymised, aggregated app data include that app users who were recently notified were more likely to test positive than app users who were not recently notified, by a factor that varied considerably over time. We estimate that the app’s contact tracing function alone averted about 1 million cases (sensitivity analysis 450,000–1,400,000) during its first year, corresponding to 44,000 hospital cases (SA 20,000–60,000) and 9,600 deaths (SA 4600–13,000).

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36495-z Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:14:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-023-36495-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-36495-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().