Timeline for COVID-19 relevant events in the UK:#

This timeline illustrates the progress of the pandemic in the UK, alongside policy measures, national and international events, and key milestones for population studies such as the approval of vaccines and wider events that impacted on public awareness and trust.

Summary:

• UK LLC holds six NHS England COVID-19 datasets: COVID-19 Second Generation Surveillance System (COVIDSGSS), Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (IELISA), National Pathology Exchange (NPEX), COVID-19 Hospitalisation in England Surveillance System (CHESS), COVID-19 Vaccination Status (CVS) and COVID-19 Vaccination Adverse Reactions (CVAR).
  

• Three datasets have alternative names. IELISA is also known as Covid-19 UK Non-hospital Antibody Testing Results, NPEX as Covid-19 UK Non-hospital Antigen Testing Results and CHESS as Severe Acute Respiratory Infection (SARI-Watch) surveillance system. We receive the data from NHS England as the IELISA, NPEX and CHESS datasets and these are the names researchers will see in the UK LLC TRE. Therefore, we refer to them by these names in our documentation.
  

• Researchers are permitted access to the COVID-19 datasets under a specific term set by NHS England: Research must be related to COVID-19. For examples of research purposes acceptable to NHS England see the COVID-19 Public Health Directions 2020
  

• The datasets span 2020 onwards, although a number are now retired.
  

• Primarily, SNOMED codes are used in the COVID-19 datasets. See the Coded variables guide for further details. NHS England introduced new dm+d and SNOMED codes during the COVID-19 pandemic, which were mapped to the World Health Organization’s Emergency use ICD codes for COVID-19 disease outbreak
  

Overview of COVID-19 datasets#

For further information see the individual dataset guides.

Table 1 Names, geographical coverage and availability of COVID-19 datasets in the UK LLC TRE ((the datasets in italics are retired)

DHSC: Department of Health and Social Care ¹As explained in the DHSC’s COVID-19 Scaling up our testing programmes, four pillars comprised the UK government’s approach to testing for SARS-CoV-2. Pillar 1 quantified the number of people with a clinical need, and health and care workers, who returned positive swab (antigen) tests (processed in PHE labs and NHS hospitals). Pillar 2 quantified the number of people in the wider community who returned positive swab (antigen) tests (processed in commercial labs). Pillar 3 quantified the number of people who returned positive serology (antibody) tests to detect immunity and to understand the efficacy of the different testing methods. Pillar 4 quantified the number of people who returned positive serology (antibody) and swab (antigen) tests to detect immunity and to understand the efficacy of the different testing methods. For further details see the DHSC’s COVID-19 testing data: methodology note