Indicators for assessing the practice and capacity of COVID-19 surveillance system

The capacity and efficiency of the COVID-19 surveillance system in identifying cases by epidemiologic indicators are critical for system utility and practice. Policymakers and health managers can make effective plans to control the COVID-19 outbreak by having valid and appropriate data surveillance ability. There make they also review the program for requiring changes. Sensitivity, specificity, positive, and negative predictive value are important indicators for assessing the capacity of the surveillance system to diagnose cases. However, due to the low sensitivity of COVID-19 diagnostic tests and the high false-negative percentage and the long interval between the diagnosis and the confirmed result, it is better to evaluate the capacity of the surveillance system to take care of reliability indicators such as Percent Positive Agreement (PPA) and KAPPA statistics.