Management of COVID-19 Pandemic Data in India: Challenges Faced and Lessons Learnt

Abstract

COVID-19 is an ongoing pandemic, which has already claimed millions of lives worldwide. In the absence of prior information on the pandemic, the governments can use generated testing data to drive policy decisions. Thus, a one-stop repository is essential to ensure sharing of clean, de-duplicated, and updated records to all the stakeholders. In India, the government initiated the testing through a network of VRDLs headed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Initially, the generated data were captured and shared in Excel sheets. As the number of cases increased, there was a need for a data management system to ensure reliable and up-to-date data to drive policy decisions. Thus, the data management team at ICMR initiated the development of a national COVID-19 testing data management tool that is currently maintaining all the data in a central hub. The first version of the tool was released in March 2020 and was subsequently modified with the changing testing guidelines and strategies. On completing one and a half years of managing the data and collecting approximately 550 million records, the team analyzed the challenges faced and the strategies used to ensure a seamless flow of data to the system and its real-time analysis. In this study, the entire duration of the pandemic has been divided into four different phases based on the resourcefulness of the country. Since the pandemic is currently ongoing, this study can be useful for countries in a different phase of pandemic facing similar challenges.

COVID-19 in India: Epidemiological reflections from initial 170 million consecutive test results

“…It has been mandatory upon all testing facilities to report covid-test information to the ICMR portal in a pre-designed Specimen Referral Form (SRF) ( 11 ). Testing data was imported from the COVID-19 data-repository of the ICMR ( 9 , 12 , 13 ) and anonymized prior to use for the analysis. India's population and demographics data were used for comparison with the demographics of the tested population.…”

“…However, as the number of cases increased, more testing methods like TrueNAT, CBNAAT, Rapid Antigen Testing were introduced. Also, a data management tool was developed and released for capturing the pandemic data ( 9 , 10 ). The current report is a retrospective analysis of the testing data collected by the ICMR.…”

Quality control of research data during the pandemic: A case study of retracted COVID-19 papers

“…The surge in submissions and rapid publication demand during the pandemic period have magnified the possible deficiencies in research data quality control efforts, and the frequent retractions have raised more and more concerns among scholars. A number of studies (Gao et al, 2020;Kaur et al, 2021) are focused on COVID-19 research data resources construction and privacy protection, with insufficient attention paid to data quality control. Several studies of COVID-19 retractions mentioned the data causes of retraction only in the retraction classification, but did not extend to scientific quality control; most of their data and extent were small and limited, failing to produce broader and representative findings, such as data issues in data retractions in terms of performance, causes and typical features.…”

Analyzing Breakthrough Infections in a Tertiary Care Hospital: A Retrospective Study Utilizing RAT-Based Screening

“…This study shows the utility of RAT screening in symptomatic and asymptomatic patients. 9 In our centre, there are separate data entry operators who enter all the required patients details, category under which they were tested, symptoms, kit used and the result. These datas were collected by using ICMR Sample Referral Form (SRF) from all patients who are tested for RAT.…”