Lessons from COVID-19 for rescalable data collection.

Novel data and analyses have had an important role in informing the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing surveillance systems were scaled up, and in some instances new systems were developed to meet the challenges posed by the magnitude of the pandemic. We describe the routine and novel data that were used to address urgent public health questions during the pandemic, underscore the challenges in sustainability and equity in data generation, and highlight key lessons learnt for designing scalable data collection systems to support decision making during a public health crisis. As countries emerge from the acute phase of the pandemic, COVID-19 surveillance systems are being scaled down. However, SARS-CoV-2 resurgence remains a threat to global health security; therefore, a minimal cost-effective system needs to remain active that can be rapidly scaled up if necessary. We propose that a retrospective evaluation to identify the cost-benefit profile of the various data streams collected during the pandemic should be on the scientific research agenda.

Education data needs and challenges for building back from COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led governments worldwide to impose extensive restrictions on citizens, some of which may have long-term impact after their removal. Education is arguably the policy domain where closure policies are anticipated to lead to greatest lasting loss, in this case learning loss. Currently, limited data exists from which researchers and practitioners can draw insightful conclusions about how to remedy the problem. In this paper, we outline the global pattern in pandemic school-closure periods and illustrate data needs through the examples drawn from Brazil and India, two large countries which experienced prolonged periods of school closures during the pandemic. We conclude with a series of recommendations for building an improved data environment at government, school and household levels, to serve the building back agenda in education, and to provide better opportunities for evidence-based policymaking thereafter.