Surveillance

Supporting EU-level surveillance is one of the core tasks of ECDC according to its Founding Regulation: for that reason, the Centre coordinates the collection of disease data so that Member States can fulfil their legal obligation to report data.

Most surveillance work planned for 2020 had to be deprioritised due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so ECDC established case-based surveillance of COVID-19 and coordinated it jointly with WHO Europe for the entire WHO European Region. Outputs included a real-time dashboard, weekly routine reports and peer-reviewed scientific articles. COVID-19 surveillance data also fed into numerous rapid risk assessments and predictive models and became the most frequently viewed dataset ever on the EU Open Data Portal.

Moreover, the Centre launched new digital instruments, such as the Geoportal and the surveillance portal EpiPulse that allow users to perform all surveillance operations from one single entry point.

In 2020, ECDC also continued to offer, at no cost, limited WGS services to Member States that do not yet have the capacity or resources to support the investigation of multinational outbreaks of selected food- and waterborne diseases. Furthermore, the offer of WGS services was extended to cover any disease under EU-level surveillance. This became useful when the need to sequence SARS-CoV-2 appeared. 4 Member States and 6 laboratories used the ECDC sequencing services for SARS-CoV-2 in 2020.