Rockinghorse Funds Covid-19 Research Project

Rockinghorse is helping to fund vital research into how teenagers and young people transmit the Covid-19 virus.

Rockinghorse has pledged to help fund a unique research project which aims to evaluate the prevalence of the COVID-19 infection in young people.

There continues to be a great deal of uncertainty about how the virus is transmitted in educational environments which impacts on the decisions about when the appropriate time is to fully re-open schools and colleges.

A large part of this uncertainty stems from the lack of data around the numbers of healthy teenagers carrying the virus which they could the unwittingly pass on to other people in their community.

This research project is a collaboration between Dr Katy Fidler, Consultant Paediatrician in Infectious Diseases at the Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital, Dr Matthew Snape, Associate Professor of Paediatrics and Vaccinology in Oxford and Professor Adam Finn, Professor of Infectious Diseases in Bristol and the ‘Be on the Team’ meningitis vaccination study.

Prof Finn explains how the samples being used were initially collected: “Researchers throughout the country, including Brighton, were collecting throat swabs from 6th form school students in February and March 2020 as part of a research study of meningitis vaccines led by the University of Oxford.

This set of samples now provides a unique opportunity to study the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic during this critical period. Laboratories at the University of Bristol have set up a highly accurate test for the virus which will now be used to analyse this important sample set.”

Ethical approval is in place for these samples to be used in subsequent research related to infectious diseases, enabling the swabs to be used to test for the virus (SARS CoV-2) causing COVID-19.

This research could be of great benefit in the future says Dr Fidler: “Brighton was the city with the first known UK ‘COVID-19 super spreader’ but luckily has been relatively unaffected so far by COVID-19, compared to London. This may be for a number of reasons, but further knowledge of the percentage of asymptomatic infections in teenagers in school pre lockdown would aid further understanding into how this pandemic may evolve post lockdown.”

In total the research team have 1406 throat swabs taken from students in the UK at the time and the research will be able to determine the percentage of these students who were well and showing no symptoms but were carrying the virus. However, swabs are tested anonymously, and positive results are not be fed back to individual participant.

They will then be able to use these figures to compare the carriage rates to the disease rates in the wider community in Brighton compared to other cities.

This research could have a great impact on the decisions made in the coming months around the re-opening of schools and colleges and help understand how best to protect the most vulnerable.

It will also provide crucially important knowledge about how the virus spreads which will be important to help plan for a second wave of COVID-19 or for future pandemics with similar viruses.