Infectious Intestinal Disease Survey During COVID-19: Additional Analysis on Association of Behaviours With Illness

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic businesses and individuals changed hygiene, eating, travelling and social behaviours. These changes have the potential to play an important role in the likelihood of people contracting diseases, including Infectious Intestinal Disease (IID). Six waves of a nationally representative survey were carried out to gather information about IID among the general population during this period. Questions were also asked about the behaviours of those who got IID and of a subset of individuals without IID. Separate surveys were run for adults and children (with parents responding on behalf of their children). Waves 1 to 4 were run for both adults and children, wave 5 was just for adults and wave 6 was just for children. Logistic regression models were used to examine the association between the behaviours and IID, for individual waves and for a combined all-waves analysis, for adults and children separately. Adults eating food from takeaways or street food vendors was the single behaviour positively associated with IID across all five waves, whereas two other behaviours were positively associated with IID in four of the five waves: buying ready to eat food outside work/school; and eating food from work/school canteen. All three of these behaviours were among those selected in the model using data from all five waves. For the children’s analysis there were few behaviours selected in any of the individual models and those that were selected only featured in one of the five models. For the children’s all-waves model the strongest effects were: use of public transport more than weekly; anybody leaving the house; and children eating ready to eat food outside of schools. In the hypothetical scenario of entirely removing eating food from takeaways or street food vendors for adults, the expected reduction in IID cases is 9-24%.