COVID-19 Surveillance Data: A Primer for Epidemiology and Data Science

Our primary objective is to improve COVID-19 metrics to enhance the quality of COVID-19 surveillance—an urgent need raised by several authors in professional and general media.1–5 We offer specific suggestions on how pandemic surveillance metrics can be better reported to improve the quality of analytical epidemiology. Health care providers and public health practitioners may find these criteria useful when conducting analyses, and students may be able to self-correct mistakes in written work. Data scientists may treat this as a primer for selecting and reporting metrics for dashboards. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print January 21, 2021: e1–e6. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2020.306088)