Seniors encouraged to take COVID survey

B.C.’s popular public health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry is encouraging more seniors and people living outside of big cities to complete the province’s COVID-19 survey by the May 31 deadline.

The survey is overseen by the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC). According to the BCCDC, Your story, our future is a population health survey to collect citizen experiences, knowledge and actions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We still would like to hear from more, particularly from more seniors, from people outside major urban centres and people from different cultural backgrounds around the province,” Dr. Henry said during her May 18 COVID-19 briefing.

The anonymous survey takes about 10 to 15 minutes to complete and asks questions about how people have changed their activities due to the pandemic, recent travel, changes in the consumption of alcohol and food, sleep patterns, changes in mental health, general health, as well as age, ethnicity, place of residence, and thoughts on some of the good and less favourable things that have come from pandemic.

The BCCDC assures the public the survey is completely confidential. The survey is run on a University of British Columbia database designed for gathering confidential medical information and it complies with strict provincial privacy laws.

More than 260,000 people have taken the survey although the CDC would like more responses to ensure a broad representation of the B.C. population.

The survey can be taken on a tablet (e.g. iPad), mobile device or computer. There are guides in Chinese, Spanish, Punjabi, Korean, Arabic, French, Farsi and Vietnamese that explain the survey in detail.

The survey can also be completed by calling 1-833-707-1900 between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., seven days a week.

Language interpretation services are also available for the phone survey.

At the end of the survey, participants have the option to sign up for a blood test to help determine immunity across the population and to use technology tools to help with future information sharing. These two initiatives are voluntary and are not required to complete the survey.

The COVID-19 survey is open to British Columbians 18 years of age and older. It can be found on the front page of the BC Centre for Disease Control website: http://covid19.bccdc.ca/