The COVID-19 Recovery Tracker (CRT) was implemented in April 2020, shortly after the COVID pandemic directly impacted Australian society, to measure both the acute impact and then track the speed and consistency of our recovery over coming months and years. The project was deliberately called the 'recovery' tracker for this reason, and questions deliberately written to be relevant both as the pandemic hit and long into the future.

The project aggregates data from multiple surveys to provide a comprehensive overview of how the Australian community is affected. There are two primary sources of data, with all responses combined into an overall database and population weighted results reported fortnightly and monthly:

• A core set of CRT questions appear as a module in a number of monthly national online tracking surveys (average monthly sample n=1,000)
• A larger dedicated online CRT survey is completed by a fortnightly structured sample of 200 people, plus any additional respondents who complete the publicly accessible version (see link to Do the Survey above)

The CRT results are used to track and understand how the community is handling the experience and impact of the Pandemic, but also to create benchmarks that can be used to interpret other survey results when selected CRT questions are also included in them. CRT data is used for benchmarking survey respondents and target audiences, and in all cases where it has been used, there has been an interaction seen between key CRT indicators and the subject matter of the client surveys.

The CRT data set now contains more than 24,000 responses and continues to grow. For details on the exact number of core and extended surveys collected to date, please refer to the regular updates available under the Publications.