Pillar 3: Surveillance, rapid response teams and case investigation

The ECDC framework to monitor responses to the COVID-19 pandemic provides a set of standardised indicators to guide public health experts in subnational, national and EU level response to COVID-19 in the EU/EEA and the UK. The indicators are presented in eight pillars.

The third pillar contains indicators for monitoring surveillance and contract tracing activities.

Specific objectives:

Surveillance:

• Monitor the intensity, geographic spread and severity of COVID-19 in the population in order to estimate the burden of disease, assess the direction of recent time trends and inform appropriate mitigation measures.
• Monitor viral changes to inform drug and vaccine development, and to identify markers of severe infection.
• Monitor changes in which risk groups are most affected in order to better target prevention efforts.
• Monitor the epidemic’s impact on the healthcare system to predict the trajectory of the epidemic curve and inform resource allocation and mobilisation of surge capacity as well as external emergency support.
• Monitor the impact of any mitigation measures to inform authorities so they can adjust the choice of measures, as well as their timing and intensity.

Contact tracing:

• To monitor whether contact-tracing operations are efficient and effective in terms of tracing contacts of all cases.
• To monitor whether contact-tracing operations are effective in reducing onward transmission.

Indicators:

3.1 Surveillance systems in place for comprehensive monitoring of COVID-19 epidemiology

3.2 Monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 virus characteristics

3.3 Proportion of affected long-term care facilities reporting weekly surveillance data

3.4 Estimates of infection prevalence from PCR-based prevalence studies in the previous month

3.5 Estimates of seroprevalence at Subnational or national level in the previous month

3.6 Rate of new confirmed cases nationwide per 100 000 persons

3.7 Proportion of all tests performed nationwide positive for SARS-CoV-2

3.8 Median delay from date of onset to date of notification per week

3.9 Rate of hospitalised COVID-19 cases per 100 000 population per week

3.10 Proportion of COVID-19 cases hospitalised out of all cases

3.11 Proportion of COVID-19 cases requiring ICU and/or respiratory support

3.12 Number and rate of new probable and confirmed deaths from COVID-19

3.13 Number of probable and confirmed deaths in long-term care facilities

3.14 Crude case fatality (CFR) rate among confirmed COVID-19 cases

3.15 All-cause excess mortality per week

3.16 Self-assessment at NUTS-2 level of transmission status

3.17 Effective reproductive number (Rt)

3.18 Use of specialised contact tracing software, e.g. Go.Data

3.19 Availability of mobile app(s) to complement manual contact tracing and proportion of population that has downloaded them

3.20 Proportion of cases where contact tracing is initiated (interview with case by public health authorities) within 24 hours of diagnosis

3.21 Proportion of contact persons reached (contacted and provided with information) within 24 hours from interview with case

3.22 Proportion of contacts who develop laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 (at initiation of tracing and over the 14 days follow-up period)

3.23 Proportion of contacts of COVID-19-positive contacts who develop laboratory-confirmed COVID-19

3.24 Proportion of all newly diagnosed cases that are part of known transmission chains (i.e. who have already been identified as a contact of a known case)

Indicator table

The indicator table provides guidelines for collection of data for each indicator, e.g. level of monitoring, frequency of collection, rationale of collection.