COVID-19 Research Initiatives
COVID-19 Research Initiatives
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected us all. The All of Us Research Program has taken steps to support COVID-19 research in a number of ways. Learn more about our activities and the COVID-19 data available to researchers.
THE COVID-19 PARTICIPANT EXPERIENCE (COPE) SURVEY
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone in different ways. The COVID-19 Participant Experience (COPE) survey asked questions about the impact of COVID-19 on participants’ mental health, well-being, and everyday life. The survey was deployed six times between May 2020 and February 2021 to help researchers understand how COVID-19 impacted participants over time. The COPE survey is the first repeated survey within All of Us.
View aggregate COPE data in the Data Browser > Learn about COPE survey source material >“Dr. Holly Garriock and Dr. Jordan Smoller led a research team that designed a recurring survey to understand All of Us participants’ experiential and health changes throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.”Read the full spotlight >
ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD (EHR) DATA
All of Us researchers can access data from the electronic health records (EHRs) of over 214,200 participants. Researchers can produce basic descriptive statistics with EHR data in the Data Browser. In the Researcher Workbench, researchers can analyze this data using Python and R. Using data from electronic health records, researchers can better understand patterns in symptoms and severity of COVID-19.
The All of Us Research Program has been working diligently with our health care provider organizations (HPOs) to make COVID-19 EHR data available to researchers in a timely manner. All of Us privacy and security safeguards, such as the removal of direct identifiers, have been applied to this data to protect participant privacy.
COVID-19 ANTIBODY STUDY AND RESULTS
Researchers are interested in discovering when and where COVID-19 began to spread in the United States in the early days of the U.S. epidemic. Since many All of Us participants have contributed samples for use in different studies, the program already had thousands of blood samples on hand when COVID-19 emerged and was able to support this research.
All of Us worked with Quest Diagnostics to test 24,079 participant samples provided between January and March 2020 to look for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The program used the Abbott Architect SARS-CoV-2 IgG ELISA and the EUROIMMUN SARS-CoV-2 ELISA (IgG) antibody testing platforms. For a sample to be considered “positive” by the research team, it had to have positive results on both platforms.
Data from the antibody tests are now available for replication studies through the Researcher Workbench. All of Us privacy and security safeguards, such as the removal of direct identifiers, have been applied to the data to protect participant privacy. Read more about the All of Us antibody study and its results.
FEATURED RESEARCH TOPIC: LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF COVID-19
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is committed to understanding the long-term effects of COVID-19 with several efforts underway. To complement these efforts, All of Us is well-positioned to drive a new understanding of PASC, including long COVID. PASC stands for post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 and is a term scientists are using to describe the potential consequences of a SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Through the Researcher Workbench, All of Us researchers can access EHR, survey, wearable, and genetic data from participants who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and continue to experience symptoms long past the initial stages of illness. These data can be compared with data from participants who recovered quickly or who have had no evidence of disease.
The Researcher Workbench also includes model workspaces on COVID-19 data and tutorials to help lower barriers for teams with limited coding experience, as well as those just getting started on the platform. All of Us will continue to release COVID-19 resources on the workbench to inspire new perspectives and research questions that yield insights on COVID-19 and its long-term effects.
View current COVID-19 research underway with All of Us data. Learn more about NIH’s efforts to study long COVID through the RECOVER Initiative.
