The COVID-19 Community Research Partnership: Objectives, Study Design, Baseline Recruitment, and Retention

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe COVID-19 Community Research Partnership (CCRP) is a multisite surveillance platform designed to characterize the epidemiology of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This manuscript describes the CCRP study design and methodology. The CCRP includes two prospective cohorts, one with six health systems in the mid-Atlantic and southern United States, and the other with six health systems in North Carolina. With enrollment beginning April 2020, sites invited persons within their healthcare systems as well as community members to participate in daily surveillance for symptoms of COVID-like illnesses, testing and risk behaviors. Participants with electronic health records were also asked to volunteer data access. Subsets of participants, representative of the general population and including oversampling of populations of interest, were selected for repeated at home serology testing. By October 2021, 65,739 participants (62,261 adult and 3,478 pediatric) were enrolled with 89% providing syndromic data, 74% providing EHR data, and 70% participating in one of two serology sub-studies. An average of 62% of participants completed a daily survey at least once a week, and 55% of serology kits were returned. The CCRP provides rich regional epidemiologic data and opportunities to more fully characterize the risks and sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection.