Serosurveillance Studies to Monitor and Understand the COVID-19 Epidemic in Kenya

Serosurveillance of convenient samples of the population can allow interpretations to be made about the collective occurrence of infection to date

From:
Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Published
16 February 2021
Country:
Kenya
Document Type:
Briefing
Theme:
Health
Authors:
KEMRI-WellcomeTrust and Uyoja, S

Abstract

The Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)’s East Africa Research Hub and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are funding a series of linked seroepidemiological studies to monitor, understand, and inform the COVID-19 response in Kenya. This study, currently underway, is led by investigators from the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme.

Serosurveillance of convenient samples of the population can allow interpretations to be made about the collective occurrence of infection to date. A first in the region, this ambitious study plans to measure SARS-CoV-2 antibody prevalence among blood donors; in attendees at ante-natal care clinics; among healthcare workers; among frontline staff in key non-healthcare service areas; among populations in Demographic Surveillance Systems; in PCR-confirmed asymptomatic cases; and, in PCR-confirmed non-severe and severe symptomatic cases.

Policy briefs and findings from this work are regularly shared with the Ministry of Health National COVID-19 taskforce and Emergency Operations Centre, helping support the government’s response and aim to protect the most vulnerable while keeping Kenyan society running. Further, data from the different workstreams will be fed into ongoing modelling work to provide more robust predictions of infection and disease spread.

Policy briefs have been uploaded to the KEMRI WellcomeTrust Research Programme COVID-19 microsite

A manuscript for the first batch of analyses has been published in the journal Science

Citation

  • KEMRI-Wellcome Trust (2020) Policy Brief on the Preliminary report of SARS-CoV-2 antibody prevalence among blood donors in Kenya. KEMRI-WellcomeTrust

  • KEMRI-Wellcome Trust (2020) Policy on the Status of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Kenya: Evidence from serological and clinical surveillance, and predictive modelling. KEMRI-Wellcome Trust

  • KEMRI-Wellcome Trust (2020) Policy Brief on the Status of the COVID-19 pandemic in Kenya: Evidence from national case-based surveillance, serosurveillance and hospital-based clinical surveillance. KEMRI-Wellcome Trust

  • KEMRI-Wellcome Trust (2021) Policy Brief on Sero-prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 among truck drivers in Kenya

  • Uyoga, S et al (2021) Seroprevalence of anti–SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies in Kenyan blood donors Science 01 JAN 2021 : 79-82 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe1916

Updates to this page

Published 16 February 2021
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