 On January 31st, 2020, the WHO declared a new coronavirus to be a global health emergency. Since then, we have all witnessed the spread of the virus and the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic. In countries around the world, health systems needed to react quickly to assess and monitor the disease outbreak and to try to control its spread. This kind of public health activity is known as disease surveillance. To conduct a COVID-19 disease surveillance, countries needed health facilities to report a number of data points on a daily or weekly basis, including how many new cases were reported, how many deaths occurred due to COVID-19, how many health workers got the infection, how many cases resulted in hospitalizations and discharges, how many tests were conducted and how the infection was transmitted. To address this urgent need, countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas turned to DHIS-2. In many of these countries, such as Sri Lanka and Rwanda, COVID-19 modules were quickly added to existing national DHIS-2 systems while some others, such as Norway, deployed DHIS-2 for the first time in response to this pandemic. Countries were able to rapidly deploy these systems by using the DHIS-2 COVID-19 Surveillance and Response Toolkit, which included implementation guidance, training material and DHIS-2 metadata packages. Metadata packages are installable DHIS-2 configuration files that allow countries to fast-track their implementation of DHIS-2 for specific health programs by starting from installable templates instead of a blank slate. One example was the COVID-19 Weekly Aggregate Surveillance Package, which features an aggregate data entry form with six sections to collect information on new confirmed and probable cases, new confirmed and probable deaths, health worker infection and death, hospitalization and discharges, tests conducted and transmission classification. Along with this data set, the package included validation rules to perform checks on the data that was collected. An example of a validation rule would be that the number of reported COVID-19 cases cannot be greater than the number of tests performed. These validation rules provide a straightforward data quality check before any analytic outputs are created from the collected data. With the data reported and validated on a weekly basis, countries were able to answer their initial questions by creating visualizations of the data reported using dashboards. Dashboards are designed to quickly find, share and analyze important outputs related to a program. In this case, the dashboard displays cumulative tests conducted, cases reported, cases hospitalized, cases discharged and deaths in charts, pivot tables and maps. While this example focuses primarily on aggregate COVID-19 surveillance, in countries where there was a need for more granular data or to monitor individual COVID-19 cases over time, Tracker was used for COVID-19 case-based surveillance, port of entry control, contact tracing, test scheduling, processing and notification, test certificate generation and more. By early 2021, COVID-19 vaccines started to become available in limited quantities, which led to a need for countries to plan and monitor how many vaccines were administered and to whom. Since most COVID-19 vaccines required two doses to be effective, it was necessary to keep a record of the individual people who were vaccinated to certify that they completed the full vaccine schedule and to monitor them for potential adverse effects after vaccination. Aggregate data collection was not sufficient to meet this need, so many countries use DHIS-2 to collect individual vaccination data using Tracker. Tracker allowed these countries to modify their existing DHIS-2 immunization registries to include COVID-19 vaccines. Others use the DHIS-2 COVID-19 vaccine delivery toolkit, installing the Tracker metadata package for individualized patient registration to track each vaccination case over time. This DHIS-2 Tracker program allows, among other features, for longitudinal tracking, follow-up of the individuals and the strengthening of vaccine safety surveillance. Patient records in this system can be searched and updated in various ways, including by scanning QR codes. Health workers can easily view lists of patients and their status to help with scheduling and follow-up. And all individual patient data can be automatically aggregated in DHIS-2 into dashboards, maps, and charts to provide a high-level overview to support vaccination campaign planning, prioritization, and resource allocation. In addition, many countries customize their DHIS-2 systems to include features for patient self-registration for vaccination appointments, automatic confirmation messages by email or SMS, and the generation of electronic vaccination certificates accessible by QR code. This is possible because while DHIS-2 metadata packages provide a starting point for configurations, countries are free to further customize and adapt them as desired to meet specific local needs. Both the COVID-19 Surveillance and Response Toolkit, alongside the COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery Toolkit, are components in a larger collection of resources known as the DHIS-2 Health Data Toolkit. The DHIS-2 Health Data Toolkit contains toolkits that can help a variety of health programs beyond COVID-19, including malaria, tuberculosis, maternal and child health, and more. Each toolkit is designed in collaboration with public health experts from the WHO, UNICEF, the CDC, and other partners, and is intended to make it easier for countries to implement DHIS-2 systems based on global standards, guidelines, and best practices. In summary, we've seen how almost 60 countries around the world use DHIS-2 to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, including using aggregate data for disease surveillance and tracker data for immunization programs. Countries were able to respond quickly by using DHIS-2 COVID-19 toolkits, including installable metadata packages, which allowed them to rapidly implement digital solutions based on international standards to respond locally to these public health challenges. These resources are part of the DHIS-2 Health Data Toolkit, which includes resources for many health programs. Using the toolkit helps countries benefit from pre-designed configurations that can be further customized and tailored to specific country needs, including changing needs over time. This shows how countries benefit both from DHIS-2 being a flexible, customizable platform and from its use as a dissemination platform for global standards.