Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent estimate his Department has made of the proportion of the UK population who have been infected with covid-19 to date.

The cumulative proportion of the United Kingdom population who have been infected with COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic is not definitively known. Government-funded population studies aim to understand the prevalence and rate of COVID-19 infection, and how the virus is spreading across the UK.

Antibody studies from the Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT) Study estimate that 3.36 million people were infected with COVID-19 in England to end June 2020. Other surveillance studies such as COVID-19 Infection Survey (CIS) and REACT provide estimates at a given time. Most recent estimates of the population in England who have had COVID-19 are 1.20%, from 31 October to 6 November, and 1.30%, from 16 October to 2 November, for CIS and REACT respectively.