The COVID Symptom Study Appeal

APPEAL TO RAISE £3 MILLION

The COVID Symptom Study is a collaboration between King's College London, the Chronic Disease Research Foundation and health science start-up company ZOE - https://covid.joinzoe.com/.  They are working together to understand COVID and its overall impact, support the health of the public and help get us out of the COVID pandemic. It is the largest community-powered COVID research project in the world with almost four million contributors.

Funding will enable us to carry out long-term research on topics including:

• Long term COVID sufferers.
• Algorithms and models that can predict COVID positive cases without lab tests.
• Further improvements to the model that can predict early disease and virus hotspots.
• The role of genetics and gut health in COVID risk and long-term symptoms.
• Future vaccine trials.

Your donation will go directly to the Chronic Disease Research Foundation who will give grants to help support over 50 scientists, engineers, researchers and data science experts to analyse COVID data.  The information collected will be delivered daily to the NHS, Scottish Government, Welsh Government and English Government as well as to all app users.

We are very grateful for your generous donations so far which helped us reach our first target of £1 million. The funds raised and unpaid support from Zoe have successfully allowed our work to continue since March. To help us continue to fight COVID, we will need over £3 million each year. By funding this unique, independent non-profit study, you are supporting efforts to save lives, reduce suffering and beat this virus.  

In the meantime, we are very hopeful that the UK government in the next few weeks will also provide us with a grant or funding to allow the core collection of data and statistical reports to continue. This would not, however, cover the costs of the clinical research or the teams of scientists at King's College London working on the virus for which funds are still needed.

The COVID Symptom Study is the only app of its kind in the world to:

• Identify hotspots such as Leicester, long before they were public;
• Prove that loss of smell is a major symptom of COVID, published in Nature Medicine;
• Show how a combination of over a dozen symptoms can pose different risks;
• Reveal the 12-fold higher risk to healthcare workers across regions;
• Show that UK COVID infection rates peaked on the 1st April with over two million people;
• Work with the UK's largest health charities including Cancer Research UK, Versus Arthritis, Age UK and all the 23 Royal Medical Colleges to help the country's most vulnerable groups.

The COVID Symptom Study will support our healthcare system in conducting research at-scale, including:

• Researching Hormone Replacement Therapy studies to understand the role of oestrogen and COVID with NHS England;
• Researching long-term sufferers to understand causes and possible treatments;
• Using a machine learning symptom model to support the Department of Health to test the public and monitor rates of new cases nationally;
• Testing a digital diagnostic with a clinical trial of over 800,000 people;
• Providing the research findings directly to app users through blogs, maps and social media.

The COVID Symptom Study app is saving lives through science.  It will play an essential role over the next year in supporting our healthcare system and the wider UK community, and in understanding the impact of COVID on long term health.

Funds no longer needed for this project will be used for other research grants into chronic diseases.

The CDRF charity number is 1186102.

Thank you from the Lead Researchers at King's College London.

From left to right: Tim Spector, Claire Steves, Seb Ourselin