What data are essential in a line list for an outbreak?

• A. Vaccination status, travel history, lab results, and payer information.
• B. Clinic hours, physician name, facility capacity, and insurance type.
• C. Case ID, onset date, symptoms, age/sex, exposure history, and exposure/outcome data.
• D. Blood pressure, heart rate, glucose level, and BMI.

Answer: (C)

The key idea is to capture just the information you need to identify cases, track timing, describe who is affected, and see how they might be connected to exposures. A line list is a simple table where each row is a case and each column holds a consistent field that lets you analyze the outbreak. The best set includes a unique case identifier, the onset date to place cases on a timeline, the symptoms to describe the clinical picture, basic demographics like age and sex to identify at-risk groups, exposure history to link cases to a source or transmission route, and exposure/outcome data to connect exposures and monitor what happened to the patient (recovery, hospitalization, death). This combination provides the essential timing, characteristics, and potential exposure patterns you need for analysis, outbreak curve construction, and guiding response. Other data such as clinic hours, physician name, facility capacity, and payer information are operational and not needed for understanding the outbreak, and routine vitals or BMI are not required for tracking transmission or outcomes. Vaccination status and lab results can be added for deeper investigation, but the core line list relies on the fields listed above.