Coronavirus (COVID-19): ONS Infection Survey – headline results – 5 January 2022

During this period of high infections, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) have decided to publish headline results from the COVID-19 Infection Survey two days early. This means that the latest estimates on infection levels are available at their earliest opportunity and further breakdowns for the same period and a longer time series will continue to be published on Fridays.

On 5 January 2022, ONS published a short, early headline release on the latest estimates of the COVID-19 Infection Survey. This release accompanies a limited dataset which includes estimates of positivity by country and variant analysis by country.

This latest Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey, UK Statistical bulletin can be found on the ONS website. The main points for Scotland are as follows:

• In Scotland, in the week 25 to 31 December 2021, the percentage of people testing positive continued to increase to 4.52% (95% credible interval: 3.98% to 5.09%); we estimate that 238,000 people in Scotland had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 209,300 to 268,000), equating to around 1 in 20 people.
• COVID-19 infections compatible with the Omicron variant continued to increase rapidly in Scotland and Omicron continued to be the most common variant in Scotland.

These early estimates are provisional and are subject to change as we receive more data, but they have undergone sufficient quality assurance to ensure that they are based upon an acceptable number of test results received up to the end of the reference week.

The next regular statistical bulletin on the COVID-19 Infection Survey will be published on the Scottish Government website on 7 January 2022.