It’s been 466 days since we kicked off the COVID-19 Study-a-thon under the fearless leadership of @Patrick_Ryan @Rijnbeek @Daniel_Prieto @tduarte @edburn @RossW @hripcsa and so, so many others. 
We are so incredibly proud of the community’s ability to rapidly respond to this pressing public health issue. Together we have generated a wealth of evidence that has contributed to our global understanding.
Many of you have been asking, “what’s going on with Charybdis and Scylla?” The truth is, we’ve been taking a critical pause to reevaluate and assess how the community should position itself in this research space going forward.
The verdict: It’s time to close this particular chapter of our OHDSI life.
We will not be asking for any more updates related to this package and consider these projects CLOSED.
Charybdis demonstrates an incredibly powerful framework to enable a large scale data characterization of an evolving novel disease. While we are very proud of what we’ve accomplished, we have decided not to undertake a 2.0 effort to update cohorts and redesign the study. The world has evolved considerably since we started this effort. It is truly amazing to see what observational health data can do to respond to a major challenge like a global pandemic.
To the 23 data partners who submitted results for their databases, THANK YOU for coming together and supporting this call to action. This was the largest number of sites we’ve ever had in a network study. THANK YOU!!!
What about the result set?
The results will live on data.ohdsi.org.
What about future manuscripts?
We welcome collaborators to use this result set to support their science. If you wish to use these results in a manuscript, please contact kostka@ohdsi.org for how to engage data owners who contributed results. Each database owner must be consulted and approve of the use of their results in publications. We ask that you uphold ICMJE requirements for co-authorship and ensure that data owners are included to attest to the findings as presented (most journals require this now). We anticipate manuscripts in various stages of flight (e.g. Women of OHDSI led gender differences paper (@MauraBeaton), the hypertension paper (@tduarte) + any resubmissions of the HIV (@julie_kohler), general paper (@krfeeney), asthma (@danielmorales), and testing (@agolozar)) will conclude soon too.
What about Scylla?
In Scylla, we created an evidence set on data.ohdsi.org that led to more questions than answers. @Daniel_Prieto @Patrick_Ryan @msuchard have thought critically about the design of this analysis. Similar to Charybdis, at this time, we do not anticipate soliciting additional data owners to contribute evidence. We thank those who helped initially executing this package. A manuscript or two from the result set may be drafted and sent to a journal pending bandwidth of the study team. Data owners who contributed results will be engaged during any and all submission activities for their approval.
Where do we go next in our COVID-19 journey?
We haven’t stopped responding to questions related to COVID-19 as they emerge. The EMA partnered with a subset of the OHDSI European sites to generate evidence related to historical background rates on thrombosis. The FDA BEST program is working with OHDSI experts from Columbia, Northeastern, Johns Hopkins and UCLA to explore adverse events of special interest. There may be future opportunities to have open calls to the community to join in this research. We encourage those who are interested in continuing to do COVID-19 work to join consortia efforts like the National COVID Cohort Collaborative which uses the OMOP CDM for its central data model.
It’s not goodbye, it’s simply time for a new chapter. We appreciate your support through the last 400+ days of this effort!!
Sincerely,
All the COVID-19 study leads who journeyed with you in this incredible year