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COVID-19 has exposed our vulnerability to pandemic infections and shown what works, and what does not. It has tested the effectiveness of the Oxford-based global, open-source, collaborative approach set up 10 years ago to prevent illness and deaths from infectious disease outbreaks: ISARIC, the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium.

Wall of faces

In January 2020, ISARIC launched the dedicated COVID-19 Clinical Characterisation Protocol (CCP) and Case Report Forms (CRF) as well as a free data management platform for researchers to upload their clinical data, globally. The database was open and publicly accessible from 23 January, 2020, when less than a thousand COVID-19 cases had been reported globally.

‘I remember I kept refreshing the database page, waiting for the first patient records to come through,’ said James Lee, ISARIC Senior Clinical Trials Manager.

On 13 February, the first patient record was successfully uploaded onto the platform. Barely a month later, this number reached 10K records.  Now, 18 months into the pandemic, there are more than half-a-million records, and the ISARIC clinical data platform has grown to become the largest international individual patient dataset of COVID-19 hospitalised cases.

Read the full story on the University of Oxford website.