Credit: Dronepicr [1]/CC BY 2.0 [2]

The Office for National Statistics is seeking to recruit a senior manager to lead the organisation’s analysis of data on Covid infection rates across the UK.

The statistics agency launched its Covid Infection Survey (CIS) throughout England shortly after the start of the pandemic in April 2020. The project had been expanded across the rest of the UK by September 2020.

The survey, delivered by the ONS in partnership with Manchester and Oxford universities and the UK Health Security Agency, is intended to provide an insight on the prevalence of coronavirus in the community. Having begun with a base of 10,000 households, almost 180,000 citizens around the UK now participate in any given week, by undergoing PCR swab tests and answering questions. About 125,000 per month take a blood test. Participants are invited to take part via the extraction of a random sample of addresses from public records.

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Information published as part of the survey includes an estimate on the proportion of the population that are currently positive for Covid-19 in each country of the UK and the number of new weekly infections per 100,000 people. Infection data is also broken down by region and age. The most recent weekly data found that the prevalence of coronavirus ranged from 6.7% in Northern Ireland to 8.6% in Scotland.

The ONS is seeking to appoint deputy director of analysis for the Covid Infection Survey. The role, which comes with an annual salary £71,000, comes with a remit to set “the vision for the CIS analytical direction from pandemic to endemicity” and “provide leadership, direction and oversight to the team of over 90 analysts, that has been brought together from a range of different teams”.

“This is your opportunity to play a leading role in work that is vital for both the UK and international response to the pandemic,” the job advert said. “This is an exciting and high-profile opportunity, leading a multidisciplinary team to produce some of the most important surveillance insight on Covid-19 that government will produce. This survey is a core part of the UK maintaining its resilience as set out in the government’s policy document Living with Covid.”

The successful candidate will be based at one of the ONS’s offices in Fareham, Newport or Darlington. Applications are open [6] until 11.55pm on 12 April.