Early Pandemic Evaluation and Enhanced Surveillance of COVID-19 (EAVE II): protocol for an observational study using linked Scottish national data | BMJ Open

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/6/e039097

Early Pandemic Evaluation and Enhanced Surveillance of COVID-19 (EAVE II): protocol for an observational study using linked Scottish national data

Strengths and limitations of this study

• We plan to interrogate national data on the Scottish general population.

• We are expanding an existing national pandemic reporting platform, which uses anonymised individual patient-level data from general practices, hospitals, death registry, virology (reverse transcriptase PCR) and serology tests to investigate the epidemiology of COVID-19 and assess the effectiveness of existing or future preventive and treatment measures.

• This is an observational study; therefore, insufficient adjustment for confounding, either due to insufficiently granular variable measurement or a lack of variable measurement, is a potential concern.