Under the leadership of Director Kristen Malecki, associate professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences, the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin (SHOW), has launched two new initiatives to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
In May 2020, SHOW—a statewide public health survey designed to help improve health in Wisconsin and throughout the world— began its COVID-19 Community Impact Survey. The goal of the survey is to collect information on the impacts of the pandemic on health and well-being across diverse communities and families.
For the first wave of data collection, researchers invited 5,502 past SHOW participants to take an online survey. Responses came from 1,377 participants across Wisconsin. Wave II data was collected between January and February 2021 and will be released in the summer. The final wave of data (III) will be collected in June 2021 and will be available for use late this year.
Malecki and SHOW scientists, including affiliates Corinne Engelman and Paul Peppard, released an analysis of the survey’s preliminary results that is available here. De-identified data from the first wave is now available on SHOW’s website for public use.
In the second project, SHOW partnered with the Wisconsin Department of Health Services and the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene to launch the Past Antibody COVID-19 Community Survey, or PACCS. This surveillance study tracks the prevalence of past infections of COVID-19 in Wisconsin.
Researchers designed PACCS to test a statewide, representative group of people three times during the pandemic. In the first wave of tests, collected from SHOW participants in July and August 2020, researchers found that 1.6% of samples had evidence of antibodies. By the second wave, conducted between October and December, the number had jumped to 6.8%. The third wave is in process.
Preliminary findings from the PACCS study can be found here. A press release on PACCS from the Medical School can be found here.