HIT-COVID, a global database tracking public health interventions to COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked unprecedented public health and social measures (PHSM) by national and local governments, including border restrictions, school closures, mandatory facemask use and stay at home orders. Quantifying the effectiveness of these interventions in reducing disease transmission is key to rational policy making in response to the current and future pandemics. In order to estimate the effectiveness of these interventions, detailed descriptions of their timelines, scale and scope are needed. The Health Intervention Tracking for COVID-19 (HIT-COVID) is a curated and standardized global database that catalogues the implementation and relaxation of COVID-19 related PHSM. With a team of over 200 volunteer contributors, we assembled policy timelines for a range of key PHSM aimed at reducing COVID-19 risk for the national and first administrative levels (e.g. provinces and states) globally, including details such as the degree of implementation and targeted populations. We continue to maintain and adapt this database to the changing COVID-19 landscape so it can serve as a resource for researchers and policymakers alike.

Fig. 1

Schematic of data collection for an example administrative unit. Each point represents a date of policy change. Colors represent the degree or intensity of policy implementation. The time arrow goes from left to right. Dashed lines indicate the period over which data were collected.

Fig. 2

Spatial resolution of the data reported in each country. This figure shows the percentage of interventions reported at the national level for data reported from January 1, 2020 to July 10, 2020. As of July 10, there have been 10,129 records logged into our database covering 137 countries. A graduated color scale is used to show the percentage of national data available for each country, with the darkest shades representing the highest proportions of such data available. Countries in grey are those where no data have been recorded.

Fig. 3

Illustrative example of implemented PHSM for data collected from New Zealand and India at the national and sub-national level to date. Each point represents an intervention. To illustrate interventions of the same type that occurred on the same date, the points are jittered vertically. Dashed line indicates when the first case of COVID-19 was reported in each country (February 28, 2020 and January 30, 2020, respectively).