CDC Awards $9M for Development of Long COVID Surveillance System

Public health and medical researchers from Indiana University (IU) have announced a partnership with the Regenstrief Institute to develop a population-based surveillance system to determine the prevalence, trends, and outcomes of long COVID following a five-year, $9 million award from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Post-COVID conditions, better known as long COVID, have become a major topic of research in the wake of the pandemic. The CDC defines long COVID as “a wide range of new, returning, or ongoing health problems that people experience after first being infected with the virus that causes COVID-19.”

Many of the long-term effects of COVID-19 infection are not yet well understood, but existing research shows that patients had a reduced risk of developing long COVID with the omicron versus the delta variant, there may be sex differences in COVID sequelae and long COVID, and long COVID may be leaving some patients with mental health issues.

These varied potential effects of long COVID have spurred public and population health stakeholders to push for increased disease monitoring and surveillance. The new partnership will develop one of the first of these population-based systems in the US, according to the press release.

To develop the system, the researchers will utilize health informatics and the surveillance structure of the existing Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC) and the Regenstrief Notifiable Condition Detector. Data from EHRs statewide will be mined to provide more accurate estimations of the incidence, prevalence, burden, and outcomes of long COVID.

Alongside mining existing data, the partnership will also enroll children, adolescents, and adults in a study to track the disease course of recent COVID infections, which will help bolster the amount of data on individuals who have survived the virus.

“We believe that the data will help us identify the most affected groups and geographic regions with higher disease burden, discern where health disparities exist and highlight potential barriers to care,” said Brian Dixon, PhD, professor of epidemiology at IU’s Fairbanks School of Public Health and interim director of the Regenstrief Institute Center for Biomedical Informatics, in a press release. “What we learn from Indiana will hopefully lead to innovative approaches for monitoring and treating post-covid conditions nationally.”

This research highlights the utility of data analytics to improve population health outcomes for long COVID.

Last year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded almost $470 million in funding to support research examining long COVID and population health.

Using this award, Louisiana State University (LSU) and Tulane Health Science Center launched research into prevention and treatment strategies for long COVID. Mount Sinai announced that it would be the lead enrollment site for two cohort studies examining the long-term effects of COVID-19.

Data analytics also helped reveal that COVID-19 vaccination reduces the risk of long COVID.