COVID-19 and the future of clinical epidemiology

Clinical epidemiology, the “basic science for clinical medicine”[1], has changed substantially over the last 50 years, moving its focus from clinician driven research and clinical settings to large cohorts and trials, NIH funding, and practice guidelines. The COVID-19 pandemic created major challenges for clinicians who needed to make urgent decisions about the management a new disease and for researchers who needed to understand the clinical syndrome and the questions of greatest importance to the pandemic response. Addressing these challenges reunited clinicians and researchers in collaborative efforts to inform decisions about disease risk, prevention, prognosis and treatment, at least in part because of the shared sense of the need to ration scarce resources, the rapid evolution of understanding of the clinical syndrome, the recognition of widespread uncertainty, and the emphasis on the common good over individual credit. Only time will tell whether the experience during COVID-19 will revive the original practice of clinical epidemiology as “the application by a physician who provides direct patient care, of epidemiologic and biometric methods to the study of diagnostic and therapeutic process in order to effect an improvement in health”[2].