Building and Feeding a Surveillance System on the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Review of Some Statistical Proposals

The purpose of this chapter is to present some innovative sample designs recently proposed to tackle the many challenges linked with the collection of reliable data during the COVID-19 recent outbreaks (Alleva et al., J Official Stat. 38(2):367–398, 2022; Alleva et al., Stat Methods Appl 32(3):983–999, 2023). One peculiar characteristic of these designs is that not only are they methodologically grounded on sound statistical properties, but they are also operational, and they can be straightforwardly implemented after considering the many practical problems that may arise during an epidemic emergency. Indeed, the designs could be implemented as a surveillance system, and they could be repeated in multiple waves during an epidemies.