Count me in': a national research register of one million Australians involved in COVID-19 research

The COVID-19 pandemic requires a massive, co-ordinated and immediate research response. There has been significant immediate investment in research addressing the acute management of severely ill patients in hospital, but little has been done to build the capacity to investigate out-of-hospital opportunities for prevention and treatment. This project will massively upgrade our ability to rapidly engage the broader Australian community. Over the last 6 months, UNSW Sydney and the George Institute for Global Health have developed a novel Research Register, 'Count Me In', designed to transform the participation of Australians in research. We will now pivot this work to address the COVID-19 emergency and support a broad range of COVID-19 related research projects done by UNSW Sydney and partners around the country. Specifically, this project will: • Link routinely collected health data to a cohort of one million Australians willing to engage in research addressing the COVID-19 crisis; • Place UNSW Sydney researchers at the heart of the research response to the COVID-19 emergency; • Enable large-scale participant recruitment to multiple COVID-19 research projects across the country; and • Define the medium- and long-term effects of COVID-19 infection on health and wellbeing.