Summary
Summary: The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for strengthened surveillance data to accurately track the distribution of infectious diseases for informing public health responses to improve infection prevention and control. Comprehensive surveillance for COVID-19 would rapidly identify infected cases, trace contacts, and monitor disease trends over time. Ongoing surveillance is also important for monitoring longer-term epidemiological trends — including infection incidence and mortality rates — across subpopulations that may be at significantly higher risk for severe disease and death, thereby improving population-specific interventions.
The American Journal of Public Health asks those who conduct some of the nation’s long-standing surveillance and survey programs how COVID has affected their operations and what design modifications have been made to continue collecting data and perhaps even to expand their data collection in response to the pandemic. To track the progression of COVID-19, authors inevitably ask the question: is a unified national surveillance system needed to respond effectively to this pandemic and future public health emergencies?
Findings: Collectively, national, state, and city surveillance and survey programs have demonstrated agility, resilience, innovation, and commitment in their efforts to meet their mission while incorporating new COVID-19–related items to monitor the pandemic and implementing new data collection, processing, and dissemination plans to release data in an even more timely manner. As more data become available, authors will be able to further examine the impact on data quality from changes made to the nation’s surveillance and survey systems, as well as the fuller extent and impact of COVID-19 on the health of the nation. This collection of experiences is expected to assist future surveillance and survey managers in pandemic contingency planning.
This study refers to 2020 California Health Interview Survey real-time estimates of data during COVID-19 pandemic.
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