Data serves an important role in informing efforts to prevent and reduce public health risks. Every day, many studies are released to help answer critical questions about COVID-19. But given the large number and different types of studies being released, it can be difficult to stay on top of the latest research.

To help inform CDC’s COVID-19 Response, as well as to help CDC staff stay up to date on the latest COVID-19 research, the Response Office of the Chief Medical Officer has collaborated with the CDC Office of Library Science to create a series called COVID-19 Science Update. This series, the first of its kind for a CDC emergency response, provides brief summaries of new COVID-19 related studies on many topics, including epidemiology, clinical treatment and management, laboratory science, and modeling. These summaries are released every Tuesday and Friday.

The team that develops the COVID-19 Science Update includes scientists from across the CDC who write, edit, produce and review the summaries. They sort through a daily list of more than a thousand newly released article titles and abstracts, identify the most noteworthy ones, and then select the articles to be included in the next COVID-19 Science Update. For each article included, they provide a brief summary of its key findings, methods, and implications. Each issue also includes an “In Brief” section, which lists recent additional articles, editorials, and commentaries, that while not summarized, are felt to contain important information related to COVID-19.

Editions of the COVID-19 Science Update prior to September 1, 2020 are now available here. HealthCap has posted archived reports posted from April 2020 through January 2021 in the CDC COVID-19 Science Update Toolkit in our Covid-19 Resources.

Stay the course, stay well, mask up, get vaccinated, and stay tuned!