Background: To manage the public health risk posed by COVID-19 and assess the impact of interventions, policymakers must be able to closely monitor the epidemic's trajectory.
Methods: Here we present a simple methodology based on basic surveillance metrics for monitoring the spread of COVID-19 and its burden on health services in Scotland.
Results: We examine how the dynamics of the epidemic have changed over time and assess the similarities and differences between metrics.
Discussion: We illustrate how our method has been used throughout the epidemic in Scotland, explore potential biases and conclude that our method has proven to be an effective tool for monitoring the epidemic's trajectory.
Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; Scotland; coronavirus; disease burden; surveillance.