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-19pandemic. 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. This article describes 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.