Eurosurv. The World Health Organization’s public health intelligence activities during the COVID-19 pandemic response, December 2019 to December 2021

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• Eri Togami¹ , Bridget Griffith¹ , Mostafa Mahran¹ , Ingrid H Nezu¹ , Bernadette B Mirembe¹ , Kaja Kaasik-Aaslav¹ , Lidia Alexandrova-Ezerska¹ , Amarnath Babu² , Tika Ram Sedai² , Masaya Kato² , Heidi Abbas³ , Mahmoud Sadek³ , Pierre Nabeth³ , Lauren E. MacDonald⁴ , Lucía Hernández-García⁴ , Jeffrey Pires⁴ , Stefany Ildefonso⁵ , Mary Stephen⁶ , Theresa Min-Hyung Lee⁶ , Benido Impouma⁶ , Tamano Matsui⁷ , Sangjun Moon⁷ , Manilay Phenxay⁷ , Viema Biaukula⁷ , Ariuntuya Ochirpurev⁷ , Johannes Schnitzler¹ , Julie Fontaine¹ , Irena Djordjevic¹ , Hannah Brindle¹ , Jessica Kolmer¹ , Martina McMenamin¹ , Emilie Peron¹ , Zyleen Kassamali¹ , Blanche Greene-Cramer¹ , Esther Hamblion¹ , Philip Abdelmalik¹ , Boris I Pavlin¹ , Abdi Rahman Mahamud¹ , Oliver Morgan¹

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) presented a unique opportunity for the World Health Organization (WHO) to utilise public health intelligence (PHI) for pandemic response. WHO systematically captured mainly unstructured information (e.g. media articles, listservs, community-based reporting) for public health intelligence purposes. WHO used the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources (EIOS) system as one of the information sources for PHI. The processes and scope for PHI were adapted as the pandemic evolved and tailored to regional response needs. During the early months of the pandemic, media monitoring complemented official case and death reporting through the International Health Regulations mechanism and triggered alerts. As the pandemic evolved, PHI activities prioritised identifying epidemiological trends to supplement the information available through indicator-based surveillance reported to WHO. The PHI scope evolved over time to include vaccine introduction, emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants, unusual clinical manifestations and upsurges in cases, hospitalisation and death incidences at subnational levels. Triaging the unprecedented high volume of information challenged surveillance activities but was managed by collaborative information sharing. The evolution of PHI activities using multiple sources in WHO’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the future directions in which PHI methodologies could be developed and used.

https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2022.27.49.2200142#html_fulltext