Research on COVID-19 through patient-reported data: a survey for observational studies in the COVID-19 pandemic

Verma, Shefali Setia; Chung, Wendy K.; Dudek, Scott; Williamson, Jennifer L.; Verma, Anurag; Robinson, Scott; Rader, Daniel J.; Reilly, Muredach P.; Sengupta, Soumitra; FitzGerald, Garret A.; Kiryluk, Krzysztof; Ritchie, Marylyn D.

Understanding the clinical risk factors for COVID-19 disease severity and outcomes requires a combination of data from electronic health records and patient reports. To facilitate the collection of patient-reported data, as well as accelerate and standardize the collection of data about host factors, we have constructed a COVID-19 survey. This survey is freely available to the scientific community to send electronically for patients to complete online. This patient survey is designed to be comprehensive, yet not overly burdensome, to gather data useful for a range of clinical investigations, and to accommodate a wide variety of implementation settings including at a COVID-19 testing site, at home during infection or after recovery, and/or for individuals while they are hospitalized. A widely adopted standardized survey that can be implemented online with minimal resources can serve as a critical tool for combining and comparing data across studies to improve our understanding of COVID-19 disease.