Frequently Asked Questions

FluTracking is a community surveillance system that harnesses the power of the internet and community spirit for monitoring respiratory illnesses such as Influenza, COVID-19 and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV). It is a national citizen science project that takes just 30 seconds of your time each week and helps to track community respiratory illness. 

Craig Dalton is the founder of FluTracking, which is a joint initiative of The University of Newcastle, Hunter New England Population Health, and Hunter Medical Research Institute (HMRI). FluTracking is funded by the Commonwealth Department of Health. 

Anyone in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong or Fiji over the age of 12 can participate.  

We encourage people to participate regardless of their state of health or vaccination status; sick or healthy, vaccinated or unvaccinated. This allows for a more representative participant cohort. Having participants who only report when they are ill would introduce biases in our data. Most importantly, you would be contributing to scientific research and helping to track respiratory illness in your local community! 

In order to have a representative image of the population, it is important that as many people as possible participate in this study – regardless of their medical history or risk factors. Someone who has never been sick is just as interesting as someone who is sick often.  

FluTracking does not have an end date currently – but you can stop participating whenever you want by unsubscribing on the website. You may also pause your survey for a period of time, for example during summer. This will not prevent you from signing up again later, if you change your mind.   

Signing up and filling out the first questionnaire (basic information about your profile) takes up to three minutes. Filling out the weekly questionnaire will then take about 30 seconds, and up to three minutes if you report for multiple household members. 

Upon registration, you will be asked some basic demographic information, and each week you will be asked about your symproms and testing behaviours. You can view the questions in the example registration and example survey.  

We’d like to see if there is any connection between educational attainment and the people who take part in FluTracking. We do the same with other factors such as age, gender, indigenous status (AU)/ethnicity (NZ), location, and flu vaccination status. This helps us understand who is taking part and whether certain groups are underrepresented. It also allows us to explore whether there are differences in respiratory illness symptoms, vaccination rates, and health outcomes across education levels.

This question helps ensure our services and research are inclusive, culturally appropriate, and responsive to the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Your response supports better health outcomes and service planning. your information will be handled respectfully and confidentially. 

We appreciate any feedback and welcome any suggestions. You can get in contact with us by emailing hnelhd-flutracking@health.nsw.gov.au in Australia or flutracking.nz@phfscience.nz in New Zealand. 

Yes, you can change your email address or update your demographics (postcode, education level, working with patients status) using either of the following options; 

1) Follow the steps outlined in the document provided 

Or 

2) Contact us to update your new email and/or demographic information for you. 

Please don’t register for the study all over again, as your old information will not be linked to the new email address. 

Yes, we can change your email address if you are retiring or changing jobs. You can either do this by clicking on the link at the bottom of your weekly emails, or you can contact us and advise us of your preferred email address. 

Yes, you can still participate in our FluTracking surveys if you are moving to another state. FluTracking is an Australia-wide research initiative, and we have expanded our survey to operate in New Zealand, Hong Kong and Fiji. If you are moving within Australia, all you need to do is update your postcode using these instructions.  If you are moving to New Zealand, Hong Kong or Fiji you will need to unsubscribe from your Australian profile and then create a new account on the home page and select the country you will be moving to. 

On occasion, our emails may get blocked by automatic SPAM filters. Please add flutracking@flutracking.net as a ‘safe sender’ to prevent this from happening. Moving the survey reminder email to your inbox will also help prevent future messages from being filtered out.  

You may need to contact your Internet Service Provider and request that they unblock FluTracking emails.  

Yes, you can. We encourage you to fill out the questionnaires for people living in your household such as your children. You can do this by opening one of our weekly survey emails and click on the link at the bottom of the email to request an update link. This will allow secure access to add household members. 

We can amend responses to influenza vaccination, COVID-19 vaccination and swab test result questions, however, we are unable to update responses to symptom questions. If you have mistakenly entered the incorrect information, you can contact us via email. 

Yes, this is a great way to raise awareness about preventing respiratory illness transmission in the workplace. You can find resources such as email templates in the Resources page of our website.  

Yes! At FluTracking, we collect reported symptoms and test results. This allows us to count everyone who has experienced symptoms or taken a test, regardless of whether or not they went to see their doctor. 

We understand that reporting these symptoms can appear to distort the data, however, we tease out chronic symptoms versus new symptoms in your weekly data. We also look at different combinations of responses such as time off work or normal duties, contacting a health professional and swab test results to track the presence of respiratory illness in the community. Thus, it is best to report whatever symptoms you have, regardless of their chronic nature, as accurately as possible. 

You can still complete the survey when you return. Each email you receive has a link that corresponds to a particular reporting week. Simply click on the email and answer the questions for that week. 

If you cannot recall the week, it is best to skip the survey for that week. 

If you were completely out of the country for the week(s) in question, it is best that you do not respond to the survey. If you are away for an extended period of time (e.g. >2 weeks), you can contact us to place your profile on hold.  

The question is about whether your symptoms stopped you from doing your usual activities (such as chores, sporting or leisure activities, caring responsibilities, planned outings, or work). Even if you don’t work, tick ‘yes’ if you were too unwell to do your normal duties.  

Yes, you should still report this information. We want to hear from you when you’re healthy, too! This helps better understand how disease is moving in the community. If you’ve had no symptoms all week, you simply report “no symptoms”.

There are several steps you can take to protect yourself and your community from the spread of COVID-19 and the flu. Learn more about prevention of the spread of COVID-19 and flu here. 

The security of your personal information is important to us. Information about our Privacy Policy can be found here on our website. 

The information on FluTracking is self-reported. Other websites may be getting their data from a variety of sources, but what you see here and on our maps is contributed only by participants like you. 

No, FluTracking is completely anonymous. To sign up, you must simply provide a valid email address and choose a preferred name. Your email address will not be linked to your data during the analysis, therefore there will be no way to identify you.

No. Your email address will only be used to send you a weekly email with the link to complete your weekly questionnaire. It will not be shared with any third-party organisations. 

Neither. You will not earn any money through participating and it will not cost you money either. Your participation in FluTracking is free and voluntary.