The Search for Better COVID Data Is Not Over Posted on : Jan 24 - 2022

From a public health perspective, the past 23 months have been, shall we say, eventful in the United States. More than 70 million Americans have contracted COVID-19, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker, and nearly 900,000 have died of it. As the Omicron variant peaks and begins to wane, epidemiologists are taking stock of our current ability to track this virus, and determine what new tools and data we’ll need to stop the next one.

When it comes to data and the COVID-19 pandemic, SAS epidemiologist Meghan Schaeffer is conflicted. The public health veteran is encouraged by some things, but the presence of large gaps in our understanding of the virus’s spread have been hard to stomach.

“It was absolutely astounding to see how much information was shared in the beginning and has been shared throughout the pandemic, and how much data people could access and interpret, mostly correctly,” says Schaeffer, who had an advanced degree in public health and epidemiology and also runs Aperio Statistical Consulting. “That was really tremendous for science as a whole. We shared not just data, but research information, sample sizes. We started to see into research in a way that we’ve never seen before. So those are all good things.”

But the COVID-19 pandemic has also expose big gaps remain in the way we collect, process, and analyze data about infectious diseases. One of the biggest problems is the disconnected nature of how information trickles up from hospitals to state departments of public health to the federal government and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“1m000%, yes,” Schaeffer says when asked about the difficulties in data integration stemming from the various disjointed processes that hospitals and other healthcare providers use to report case counts and other data. “This this to me is one of the biggest pain points of the pandemic, and we cannot enter another situation like this with the current state of health care and public health not interacting with each other in a productive way.” View More