Timely and Accurate Data From Vital Records Registration, Merged With Disease-Reporting System Data, Can Truly Empower Public Health Officials.

Over the past decade, building on initiatives by the National Center for Health Statistics and state vital records offices across the United States, as well as the coordinating efforts of the National Association of Public Health Statistics and Information Systems, there has been a collective quantum leap in the vital records registration methods used in the United States.1 Individual states' deployment of Web-based birth and death reporting is nearly complete. Because of these advancements, analytical data on deaths are now available roughly seven days from death across most of the United States compared to from 60 to 90 days from death under paper-based registration. Releases of provisional population-based data on births and deaths, including deaths by cause of death, within months rather than years from the date of death has been taking place for some time now.2 4 As COVID-19 began to spread, the efforts to modernize vital records registration created an ideal environment for adapting the handling of these data to provide critical groomed and population-based information on deaths from this new disease.