Investigating incidence, severity and risk factors for COVID-19 in BAME and Migrant groups to inform public health action.

Every week, 12,000 people in the UK will report their COVID-19 symptoms as part of a new effort to track how the virus hits minority ethnic and migrant communities. Most current data on COVID-19 comes from hospitalised patients, which misses the vast majority of infections and provides a skewed picture of who gets sick and why. This project fills that gap by studying the virus in the community, where most transmission occurs. The first study expands an existing surveillance programme—Virus Watch—to include more people from Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) and migrant backgrounds. Participants will report symptoms weekly, undergo PCR tests when symptomatic, and provide antibody blood tests at the start and end of the study. This will reveal how infection rates, symptom severity, and immune responses differ across groups. The second study analyses health records for nearly all non-EU migrants and refugees who arrived in the UK since 2015. It will track how often these groups are diagnosed, hospitalised, or die from COVID-19, and whether pre-existing health conditions or socioeconomic factors drive those risks. If successful, the research will give public health agencies the concrete data they need to target testing, vaccination campaigns, and support services to the communities most at risk—rather than relying on hospital-based snapshots that miss the bigger picture.