2 August 2022
The International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC), one of our partners within the RECOVER Consortium, has recently published a new paper on COVID-19 data. ISARIC is a global federation of clinical research networks that collaborates on the prevention of illness and death caused by infectious disease outbreaks through research response. The report focuses on a prospective, standardised, global dataset of patients that were hospitalised with COVID-19.
This dataset is one of the most extensive, international databases. It was collected during the COVID-19 pandemic with the ISARIC-World Health Organisation Clinical Characterization Protocol and data tools that were used by a network of hospitals in more than 60 countries. It consists of data from 705,000 patients from 1,500 centres worldwide. The data include signs and symptoms, pre-existing comorbidities, vital signs, chronic and acute treatments, complications, dates of hospitalisation and discharge, mortality, viral strains, vaccination status, and other data.
The objective of the dataset is to further understand COVID-19 through access to detailed clinical information on infected patients from a range of settings. This was essential for the increase of knowledge that has led to better patient management and vaccine production for the virus. The generalisability of the evidence generated is increased by diversifying populations, regions and resource levels from which the data originates.
The curation and governance efforts are invested centrally by a specialised team, by collating, standardising and sharing extensive disparate data, resulting in efficient data access. Many researchers focussed their analysis on the questions most relevant to the patients in their settings. This approach accelerates pandemic response through the promotion of locally-driven, locally-relevant knowledge generation, which most likely will impact the public health policy and drive societal benefits beyond health.
Read the report here.