FOI Ref: FOI/2021/2833
You asked
Firstly, I would be very grateful if you could send me all records in the possession, custody or control of the Office for National Statistics describing the isolation of a SARS-CoV-2 virus, directly from a sample taken from a Covid-19 diseased patient, where the patient sample was not first combined with any other source of genetic material (i.e. monkey kidney cells aka vero cells; lung cells from a lung cancer patient).
Please note that I am using "isolation" in the every-day sense of the word: the act of separating a thing(s) from everything else. I am not requesting records where "isolation of SARS-CoV-2" refers instead to:
- the culturing of something
- or the performance of a RT-PCR amplification test
- or the computer sequencing of something
Please also note that my request is not limited to records that were authored by the Office for National Statistics, or that pertain to work done by the Office for National Statistics. My request includes any sort of record, for example (but not limited to) any published peer-reviewed study that the Office for National Statistics has downloaded or printed.
If any records match the above description of requested records and are currently available to the public elsewhere, please provide enough information about each record so that I may identify and access each record with certainty (i.e. title, author(s), date, journal, where the public may access it).
Preferred formats:
Pdf or Word documents sent to me via email; I do not wish for anything to be posted to me.
Secondly, could you please inform me what your recommended RT-PCR Test Cycle Threshold is? Has this changed recently and, if so, when and why did it change?
We said
Thank you for your request.
The COVID-19 infection survey (CIS) is a household survey which refers to the number of current COVID-19 infections within the community population; community in this instance refers to private residential households and it excludes those in hospitals, care homes or other institutional settings.
We do not hold any data relating to the isolation of the COVID-19 virus.
The PCR tests used for our survey are accredited tests and part of the national testing programme. The swabs are processed by the Lighthouse Laboratory in Glasgow and they are responsible for setting the Ct threshold of positive tests. More information about our swab procedure can be found in our methodology article or our study protocol.
In the technical dataset accompanying our latest bulletin, you can find the genetic lineages and Ct values of a sample of the positive tests returned by the participants in our survey on tab 1a.
For further information and an overview of all the data published across the ONS, please check our ONS COVID Insights Tool.