Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Santé publique France has worked alongside its partners to develop a regionally-based surveillance system to track the pandemic and create tools to slow its spread, while ensuring transparency regarding this data, thereby actively contributing to keeping the public informed through a variety of information channels. In this context, throughout the health crisis, epidemiological situation reports were produced for each region and published regularly on the website, allowing the dynamics of the pandemic to be tracked.

Today, Santé publique France is publishing the first regional surveillance reports covering the period from March 2020 to June 2021. These reports describe the monitoring system—unprecedented in history—implemented during this pandemic, provide an initial estimate of the pandemic’s immediate health impact in each region, and outline potential improvements to the system in anticipation of emerging health threats.

What data is available?

The objective is to contextualize and analyze data from surveillance systems: infections, hospitalizations, intensive care admissions, mortality, clusters, vaccination coverage, the emergence of new variants, and their transmission characteristics. These indicators were deployed as close as possible to the population and at fine geographic scales. They thus enabled decision-makers to base their response strategy as closely as possible to local communities.

What do these reports contain?

These reports were compiled using data from the surveillance systems employed by Santé publique France to track the spatiotemporal dynamics of the COVID-19 epidemic, its impact on morbidity and mortality as well as on the healthcare system, and the progress of vaccination coverage.

These analyses, produced across all regions, are presented by surveillance system, and a summary allows for tracing the history of the epidemic in the region through a cross-sectional review of epidemiological surveillance results, compared with the evolution of the regional epidemic context and the implementation of public health measures.

The daily epidemiological surveillance and summary data presented in these bulletins are essential for guiding crisis management and for better understanding, in retrospect, what has occurred in each region. They inform discussions with local stakeholders to collectively advance efforts to control the epidemic. They will be expanded upon in the future, particularly regarding the impact on mental health, the potential impact of non-COVID-19-related cancellations, or the long-term consequences of severe cases (long COVID).