School Based Syndromic Surveillance System

Outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic caused schools to go from in-person to virtual classrooms leading to adverse outcomes including lower educational metrics. Inability to prepare for a pandemic could be attributed to a lack of syndromic surveillance system to detect outbreak based on school-related data. Public health officials, including CDC team, tasked with identifying and tracking school learning modes and outbreaks within schools had to craft a manual process that was laborious and time-consuming because it relied on a combination of web scraping and calling school districts. School-related data (e.g., reasons for absences, outbreaks, and school closures) from a surveillance system would have been useful. Preventing future pandemics will require coordination and cooperation at all strata of public health. Syndromic surveillance system to detect outbreaks based on school-related data could be critical in building an infrastructure to address issues identified in the solicitation. Proposal is for (a) identifying systems that could serve as a syndromic surveillance system for school and evaluating systems as per CDC’s framework for evaluating public health systems, (b) developing design for a new surveillance system that would collect school-related data, and (c) providing cost and timeline for developing, testing, and deploying including annual operational and modifications costs.