Participatory syndromic surveillance as a tool for tracking COVID-19 in Bangladesh

•Participatory syndromic surveillance can be a useful tool for tracking COVID-19.•Self-reported syndromic data exhibits a strong association with lab-confirmed cases in Bangladesh.•Syndromic data suggests an earlier spread of the outbreak than is evident from lab-confirmed data.•Participatory surveillance can enable a more rapid response to public health emergencies. Limitations in laboratory diagnostic capacity and reporting delays have hampered efforts to mitigate and control the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic globally. To augment traditional lab and hospital-based surveillance, Bangladesh established a participatory surveillance system for the public to self-report symptoms consistent with COVID-19 through multiple channels. Here, we report on the use of this system, which received over 3 million responses within two months, for tracking the COVID-19 outbreak in Bangladesh. Although we observe considerable noise in the data and initial volatility in the use of the different reporting mechanisms, the self-reported syndromic data exhibits a strong association with lab-confirmed cases at a local scale. Moreover, the syndromic data also suggests an earlier spread of the outbreak across Bangladesh than is evident from the confirmed case counts, consistent with predicted spread of the outbreak based on population mobility data. Our results highlight the usefulness of participatory syndromic surveillance for mapping disease burden generally, and particularly during the initial phases of an emerging outbreak.