Current COVID-19 vaccine studies

UCL researchers have set up a national research study called “Vivaldi” with Four Seasons healthcare, a large care home provider, and the Department of Health and Social Care.  The aim of the study is to find out how many care home staff and residents have been infected with COVID-19, to inform decisions around the best approach to COVID-19 testing in the future.

By testing around 6,500 staff and 5,000 residents across around 180 care homes in England, we will estimate the proportion who have been infected with COVID-19 in the past and have antibodies, and the proportion who are infected now. These tests will be repeated over time to learn how COVID-19 spreads in care homes and how long the antibody response lasts and whether this helps to prevent re-infection with the virus. In those who are currently infected, we will also collect information on who is experiencing symptoms to help us to understand how this affects the spread of infection within care homes. We will find out about how infection spreads between care homes, the community and hospitals by linking the information we collect to national data on hospital admissions and deaths.

In collaboration with researchers at the University of Birmingham, we will be performing more in-depth tests that will tell us about the different components of the immune response to COVID-19 and vaccination and how this changes over time.

We will perform in-depth interviews with a number of care home staff to understand how the pandemic has affected working conditions and measures to prevent infections in care homes in collaboration with the CATCH-19 study. This is the largest care home study in England and possibly the world.  Our goal is to use our results to inform national policy on COVID-19 testing and prevent infections in care homes.

Department of Health and Social Care, UK Health Security Agency