The WHO Disease Outbreak News during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) was an important public source of information - not only about the pandemic, but also thousands of other potential health emergencies. Here, we examine the 242 reports published in the WHO Disease Outbreak News (DON) during the first four years of the Covid-19 pandemic (2020 to 2023), and document the diseases and regions that were reported. We find that multinational epidemics of diseases like Ebola virus and MERS-CoV continue to dominate the DON. However, recent years have also seen more reports of climate-sensitive infectious diseases, as well as a state shift in influenza outbreak reporting in both China and the rest of the world. Surprisingly, the DON was only minimally used to document the Covid-19 pandemic and the global clade II mpox epidemic, almost exclusively before the declaration of a public health emergency of international concern. Notably, inconsistent reporting related to Covid-19 variants of concern speaks to the ongoing evolution of the DON as a resource, and potentially, to its complicated relationship with international travel and trade restrictions. We suggest that researchers should continue to exercise caution when treating the DON as a global record of outbreak history, but that the DON is a compelling record of the WHO itself, including the process it uses to assess outbreak risk.

Fig 1. The global distribution of outbreak reporting and subject matter captured in the DON during the first four years of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Figure created in R, utilizing the rnaturalearth package, which draws upon a public domain map dataset [8].

Fig 2. Weekly case counts and the timing of DON reports related to (A) the Covid-19 pandemic, and (B) the global clade II mpox epidemic.

Transparent orange circles indicate points where a report about the outbreak was published in the DON. Solid lines indicate the date of PHEIC declaration, and dashed lines indicate the end of the declaration.