You asked
The ONS now has 12+ months of data which it has rightly quantified and qualified in reporting outcomes by age, gender and ethnicity.
However, the ONS has an equal responsibility to quantify and qualify causes (transmission) by age, gender and ethnicity, which I am requesting.
By causes, I mean micro-geographical areas (city districts and towns) having highest (say the top three) human to human transmission, over time from February 2020, together with the gender, age and ethnicity of the persons involved. Whilst data on outcomes and variant transmissibility are important factors, I believe understanding actual transmission is critical.
For relevance a town/city district transmission value would be its R number;
To take account symptomatic and asymptomatic transmission, the gender, age and ethnicity values would be those of all persons recorded as permanent residents, including children.
We said
Thank you for your request.
The COVID-19 Infection Survey is a household survey that estimates the number of people testing positive for infection in the UK. Our statistics refer to individuals in the community, by which we mean private households. These figures exclude infections reported in hospitals, care homes or other institutional settings.
You can find the latest analysis on transmission using the COVID-19 Infection Survey data in this article written by our academic partners. This analysis includes the association between transmission within and between households and age from 26 April 2020 to 8 March 2021.
Unfortunately, we do not hold analysis on transmission by gender, ethnicity, or at the geographical level you have described. To provide this information, we would need to create bespoke analysis. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Public Authorities are not obligated to create information in order to respond to requests. We therefore consider this to be information not held.
However, it may interest you to know that we will be publishing a technical article on transmission in the near future.