Surveys

I have just completed a COVID-19 in-home antibody test, part of a survey run by a consortium of DHSC (presently the Department of Health & Social Care), Imperial College, Ipsos MORI and the NHS. A sort of hybrid between the COVID test we took recently (before being allowed to remove a resident of a care facility) and the finger-prick warfarin test I take on a regular basis.

The kit arrived in a white jiffy bag, complete with a letter, a fact sheet and a couple of leaflets - in  addition to the kit itself in its own white cardboard box. They say the whole business takes half an hour, but first time around, reading the instructions last night, reading them again this morning, doing the test and telling the computer about the results probably took about an hour and a half. To be fair, if I was to do it all again, it probably would take half an hour, with most of that being the reporting bit.

Timing apart, the test was well presented and well organised. All the necessary bits were in the bag, just like it said in the instructions.

The reporting bit was about on a par with the surveys I take for YouGov, with it not being at all clear how to answer some of the questions. For example, they ask about symptoms in the last eighteen months or so. Do they need to know that I have a sore throat from time to time and that I am sometimes a bit hoarse first thing in the morning? What about symptoms arising from disorders that probably have nothing to do with COVID-19? I suppose the survey designers have a nice balance to strike between keeping the survey simple, with instructions short enough that people are going to bother to read them, and accuracy. Maybe it all comes out in the statistical wash.

The IT side of things worked fine.

The telephone side of things not so good, with my usually reliable Microsoft telephone not taking very good pictures on this occasion, perhaps thrown by the high proportion of white and off-white.

Hopefully my contribution will make the cut, will make it to the bottom line.

PS: the DHSS might have changed its name to DHSC and our fat leader might have promised (in his bombastic way) to sort out social care - but I don't think social care made it to the recent Queen's speech and I would be agreeably surprised if he manages to square the Tory circle of sorting out social care without raising tax (in one way or another) to pay for it. Furthermore, why do Tories, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail all think it so awful that we might to have to mortgage our houses to pay for our end-of-life care? Particularly since the prices that the houses of us older people now fetch are largely windfall gain, not having all that much to do with what we paid for them in the first place.

Reference 1: https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk. 'Bookmark this page for the very latest Ipsos research data exploring public opinion and expert insights related to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Together, this data shows the evolution of public opinion tracking the coronavirus outbreak and worry about the health pandemic that continues to worsen, before it gets better'.