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. 2022 Dec;27(49):2200142.
doi: 10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2022.27.49.2200142.

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

Eri Togami  1 , Bridget Griffith  1 , Mostafa Mahran  1 , Ingrid H Nezu  1 , Bernadette B Mirembe  1 , Kaja Kaasik-Aaslav  1 , Lidia Alexandrova-Ezerska  1 , Amarnath Babu  2 , Tika Ram Sedai  2 , Masaya Kato  2 , Heidi Abbas  3 , Mahmoud Sadek  3 , Pierre Nabeth  3 , Lauren E MacDonald  4 , Lucía Hernández-García  4 , Jeffrey Pires  4 , Stefany Ildefonso  5 , Mary Stephen  6 , Theresa Min-Hyung Lee  6 , Benido Impouma  6 , Tamano Matsui  7 , Sangjun Moon  7 , Manilay Phenxay  7 , Viema Biaukula  7 , Ariuntuya Ochirpurev  7 , Johannes Schnitzler  1 , Julie Fontaine  1 , Irena Djordjevic  1 , Hannah Brindle  1 , Jessica Kolmer  1 , Martina McMenamin  1 , Emilie Peron  1 , Zyleen Kassamali  1 , Blanche Greene-Cramer  1 , Esther Hamblion  1 , Philip Abdelmalik  1 , Boris I Pavlin  1 , Abdi Rahman Mahamud  1 , Oliver Morgan  1
Affiliations

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

Eri Togami et al. Euro Surveill. 2022 Dec.

Abstract

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.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; epidemiology; event-based surveillance; public health intelligence; surveillance.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Categorisation of COVID-19 Public Health Intelligence activities, as of December 2021a
Figure 2
Figure 2
The adaptation of the World Health Organization’s public health intelligence activities for COVID-19, 2020–2021
Figure 3
Figure 3
COVID-19 public health intelligence detected by the World Health Organization at global level by category type, as of December 2021
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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