Sangeeta Dhami, Didi Thompson, Maha El Akoum, David W Bates, Roberto Bertollini, Aziz Sheikh

The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the pivotal importance of access to multidimensional, high-resolution data in near real-time to inform and enable evidencebased policy, public health and clinical decisions on how to effectively respond to various stages of the pandemic. Different data sources are particularly useful at various stages of a pandemic: initially they can help to identify and confirm the emergence of an infection with pandemic potential, understand its epidemiology, inform deliberations on risk stratification, and make decisions about travel; and later data can enable assessments of the uptake, safety and effectiveness of nonpharmacological interventions, vaccines and therapeutics, help us understand the impacts on health system functioning, and to inform deliberations on when a pandemic can be declared over.