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How Australia’s national data linkage  research infrastructure helped the nation battle  a once-in-a-lifetime public health emergency.

In early February 2020—a month before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic—Queensland’s Chief Health Officer Dr Jeanette Young called data linkage staff in on a Sunday. She’d recognised the role that data would play in Australia’s coronavirus response, and instructed the team to begin linking Australian Border Force information on returned travellers to health and other government records. It was the beginnings of a nation-wide ramp up of the country’s data linkage systems that would support every aspect of Australia’s COVID-19 response.