Survey Update (And It’s Not A Good One)

Afternoon all.

Some of you may have attempted to complete the survey today and noticed that it’s not accepting responses at the moment.

That’s because there was a malicious cyberattack from 10.43 this morning, flooding our survey with over 25,000 false responses. Obviously, this has massively skewed the dataset. We have 158 valid responses - thank you - which will now have to be analysed manually, instead of being able to use the generated responses via Google Forms.

Cass put a great deal of work into developing and launching this survey. They’re very angry and upset that someone would target a small group of disabled people, with limited resources trying to obtain data that has not been collected in the U.K. for Keyworkers. The rest of the group is worried about the significant impact this stress is going to have on Cass, which could lead to a setback in their health - this is what this kind of stress can do. Cass has agreed to stop working on the survey for now, but feels it’s important to let all the Facebook groups they have posted in about what’s going on.

We are using Google Forms because it’s free. We do not have any income and have limited resources as it is, given we are all unwell and often have to prioritise other things, like health, family, finances and so on. So this was not only malicious, it was an act of ableist discrimination. The data we have managed to save now has to be analysed manually. That is a lot of work for basically one or two people - and that’s on top of drafting, structuring and editing the report itself - especially when they’re dealing with chronic conditions that affect their cognitive abilities. 

We were hoping for 1000 responses - double what our last survey had. We have elected representatives’ offices, core participants and other long Covid groups, plus at least one professional college waiting on this data; data, which we will remind you, the U.K. governments continually fail to collect, meaning the impact of Long Covid on Keyworkers across small sectors is being ignored. We have about 160 responses. It’s enough for a case study and small sample.

We know that we won’t be able to reopen the existing survey and that if we want to collect more data, we will have to open another one for others who want to participate, using the same questions. We will have to figure out a way of making this far more secure than we did, which means collecting some contact information. We don’t know if there’s anyway of stopping this from happening again. We are certainly taking advice on this and have asked for a bit of support, but we don’t know if we will get it.

This is a delay to our work. It’s a delay to getting the short survey report we recently did out. It’s a delay to getting this report out. I suppose that was the point - to try and put off Long Covid advocates from trying to raise awareness of the kinds of issues we face and lack of support we get.

So delayed, yes, but we aren’t stopping. We just have to pause to see what we can do and the next steps with our pension survey.

Thanks for your support, as always.