Official Statistics

Annex B - Note on COVID-19

Published 14 July 2020

The World Health Organisation officially declared the outbreak of COVID-19 a pandemic on 11th March 2020. Guidance and restrictions were also put in place in the United Kingdom during March 2020.

By using the date in which those who completed the Community Life Survey 2019/20 online, we have broken down our key estimates by month of completion from April 2019 to March 2020. If the pandemic has affected any of these estimates, we would expect to see a significant difference between the estimates for either February 2020 or March 2020 compared to multiple other previous months.

For the variable ‘Agree (‘definitely’ or ‘tend to’) that their local area is a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together’, the estimate for March 2020 is significantly higher than in the months July 2019 and August 2019. Given that this significant difference is not observed for any other month in 2019, we do not believe that there has been an effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on this variable.

There are no other key variables in which estimates for February 2020 or March 2020 are significantly different to any other months.

Please note that monthly estimates are only indicative since sampling is not representative at a monthly level.

Estimates for ‘Whether respondents agree that their local area is a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together’ split by month of completion (online survey only)

Apr 19 May 19 Jun 19 Jul 19 Aug 19 Sep 19 Oct 19 Nov 19 Dec 19 Jan 20 Feb 20 Mar 20 Total
Estimate 81% 81% 87% 79% 79% 85% 80% 83% 84% 81% 83% 87% 82%
Lower 74% 78% 83% 74% 75% 80% 75% 79% 78% 76% 79% 83% 81%
Upper 86% 84% 90% 82% 82% 88% 84% 86% 89% 84% 87% 90% 83%
Respondents 240 820 510 464 731 436 535 766 269 481 578 526 6356