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Article History

Accepted: 23 April 2023

First Online: 27 May 2023

Declarations

:

: Dr. Alacevich acknowledges funding from the Higher Education Innovation Fund and ESRC Impact Acceleration Account through the University of Oxford’s COVID-19: Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Impacts—Urgent Response Fund. Dr. Nicodemo receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/T008415/1) and from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration Oxford and Thames Valley at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. Professor Petrou receives support as a NIHR Senior Investigator (NF-SI-0616-10103) and from the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Oxford and Thames Valley at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funders.

: None. SdeL has received funding through his University for vaccine related research from AstraZeneca, GSK, Sanofi, Seqirus, MSD and Takeda. He has been a member of advisory boards for AstraZeneca, Sanofi and Seqirus.

: EMIS Health’s COVID-19 Symptom Surveillance tool covered the underpinning research infrastructure and governance, including approval and consent procedures for voluntary participation as articulated in EMIS Health’s privacy policy. Processing of personal and sensitive data is conducted by EMIS Health under the legal basis of medical research or public interest. The data used for this study underwent previous full anonymisation by EMIS Health. The research team had access to a dataset stripped of all personal identifiers. As a result, the study was not subject to ethics review or General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements.

: EMIS Health obtained explicit consent from each survey participant (or their guardian, if aged 16–18 years) and provided de-identified data to the research team.

: Medical research to answer legitimate research questions in the public interest is justified under schedule 1, sections 2–4 of the Data Protection Act 2018 and in the presence of appropriate data subject safeguards. The legal basis for EMIS’s processing of data is consent or approval for exemption under Section 251 of the NHS Act 2006.

: The data that support the findings of this study are available from EMIS Health in collaboration with the University of Oxford and the UK Royal College of General Practitioner but restrictions apply: the data were used under license agreement for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Anonymised data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of EMIS Health, the University of Oxford and the UK Royal College of General Practitioner.

: Codes are available from the authors upon request.

: Conceptualisation, CA, CN, SdeL. and SP; methodology, CA, CN, SP; formal analysis, CA and IT; writing—original draft preparation, C.A. and I.T.; writing—review and editing, CA, CN, IT, SdeL, SP; funding acquisition, SP and SdeL. All authors have read, reviewed, and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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