Thank you, Dr. Brotto.
A significant strength of our project is that it draws from seven existing cohorts that are representative of women in B.C., totalling over 40,000 individuals who've consented to be contacted for future research. These individuals received an email invitation that described the study's aims and obtained their e-consent.
The link then took them to the survey, which consisted of one core module focused on a comprehensive epidemiological survey on COVID-19-related symptoms and risks, socio-demographics, medical history and vaccine attitudes. They then proceeded to four modules that focused on substance use; psychosocial outcomes and gender-based violence; underlying comorbidities, including HIV; and economic outcomes and health care disruption. Where appropriate, such as with the psychosocial outcomes, we employed validated clinical scales.
At the end of the survey modules, participants were invited to send the survey link to another household member who identified as another sex or gender. They were also invited to provide their address to receive a dry blood spot kit to measure antibody responses, and those are being prepared to be sent out right now.
Participants were stratified into nine five-year age strata from 25 to 69, with a target for recruitment of about 750 participants for each of those strata, for a total of 6,750 participants. The data we're going to discuss today are based on responses from about 5,300 individuals, out of an approximate 15,000 invitations sent out, so we had a response rate of about 30%.
Just to be clear, while we administered the survey at one time point, for some of the questions we asked people to think about their experiences for three specific periods of time: the three months before the pandemic or pre-pandemic; during phase one of the pandemic, which was mid-March to mid-May; and phase two, which started after the middle of May. Going forward, we are continuing to collect longitudinal data.
I would like to share some of our results.
The mean age of participants was 51, and most of the respondents, 87%, identified as female. In terms of gender, we had 59 individuals who identified as trans or non-binary; 31% were essential workers, and over half reported chronic health conditions.
For this presentation, we will report on rates of overall depression, moderate and severe depression, anxiety, loneliness, distress, intimate partner violence, and alcohol and cannabis use in the defined three phases of the pandemic.
We plan, in the future, to report on these analyses by gender, culture and ethnicity, including indigeneity and race, as well as other socio-demographic variables, once our target sample size is reached.