Surveillance
In the area of surveillance, ECDC concluded the 4-year evaluation of EU/EEA public health surveillance systems "EPHESUS" project after 50 EU/EEA public health surveillance system evaluations. Some of the findings will be instrumental in developing EU/EEA surveillance standards (notifiable diseases, surveillance objectives, system design and common practice, datasets to be reported, etc.) in the years to come.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, ECDC published an updated COVID-19 surveillance guidance. In addition, a first new set of standards including a common reporting protocol was agreed for the surveillance of Severe Acute Respiratory Infections (SARI). Weekly data submission was technically implemented, and at the end of 2021, four EU/EEA countries and two non-EU/EEA countries of the WHO European Region had started reporting regularly.
Throughout 2021, the Centre continued threat detection
through event-based surveillance, expanding the range of
data sources. Surveillance and epidemic intelligence were
further integrated to enhance the detection, validation and
assessment of signals, particularly in response to the great
amount of COVID-19 data being generated.
ECDC updated its Surveillance Atlas of Infectious Diseases with 2020 data and published 30 Annual Epidemiological Report chapters covering 2018, 2019 and 2020.
The new ECDC surveillance portal, EpiPulse, went live with event-based surveillance and network communication functionality and a visualisation tool for EU/EEA whole-genome sequencing data. A proof of concept for indicator-based surveillance (based on COVID-19) was kicked off and is about to conclude in 2022.
Learning from the experience with COVID-19, ECDC supported extensively the European Commission to ensure that funding from the EU4Health programme addresses some of the key surveillance challenges in Member States. A joint action on implementing automated surveillance for pandemic prone diseases was launched by the European Commission, based on the ECDC long term surveillance framework 2021-25.
During 2021 ECDC participated actively to the implementation of the European Health Data Space (EHDS), providing the European Commission with requirements for EU level surveillance and with a use case to be piloted in 2022. ECDC joined a large European consortium bringing together 9 national health data platforms and 3 research infrastructures answering a call for projects to set up a test version of the EHDS. These surveillance developments were discussed with Member States during the Third ECDC Joint Strategic Meeting. A new tool was launched (EpiTweetr), and based on the experience acquired, a further automation of the signal detection and assessment process will take place during 2022.
Significant progress was made in the field of epidemic intelligence. A number of processes were automated, and a major automation initiative started to detect and assess signals from large volume of social media data. This resulted in a more comprehensive and accurate monitoring of global signals, including from COVID-19.