COVID AMP: An Open Access Database of COVID-19 Response Policies (preprint)

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in the spring of 2020, governments around the world began to implement policies to mitigate and manage the outbreak. Significant research efforts were deployed to track and analyse these policies in real-time to better inform the response. While much of the policy analysis focused narrowly on social distancing measures designed to slow the spread of disease, here, we present a dataset focused on capturing the breadth of policy types implemented by jurisdictions globally across the whole-of-government. COVID Analysis and Mapping of Policies (COVID AMP) includes nearly 50,000 policy measures across 152 countries, 124 intermediate areas, and 235 local areas between January 2020 and June 2022. With up to 40 structured and unstructured metadata fields per policy, as well as the original source and policy text, this dataset provides a uniquely broad capture of the governance strategies for pandemic response, serving as a critical data source for future work in legal epidemiology and political science.

The World Health Organization’s Disease Outbreak News: a retrospective database (preprint)

The World Health Organization (WHO) notifies the global community about disease outbreaks through the Disease Outbreak News (DON). These online reports tell important stories about both outbreaks themselves and the high-level decision making that governs information sharing during public health emergencies. However, they have been used only minimally in global health scholarship to date. Here, we collate all 2,789 of these reports from their first use through the start of the Covid-19 pandemic (January 1996 to December 2019), and develop an annotated database of the subjective and often inconsistent information they contain. We find that these reports are dominated by a mix of persistent worldwide threats (particularly influenza and cholera) and persistent epidemics (like Ebola virus disease in Africa or MERS-CoV in the Middle East), but also document important periods in history like the anthrax bioterrorist attacks at the turn of the century, the spread of chikungunya and Zika virus to the Americas, or even recent lapses in progress towards polio elimination. We present three simple vignettes that show how researchers can use these data to answer both qualitative and quantitative questions about global outbreak dynamics and public health response. However, we also find that the retrospective value of these reports is visibly limited by inconsistent reporting (e.g., of disease names, case totals, mortality, and actions taken to curtail spread). We conclude that sharing a transparent rubric for which outbreaks are considered reportable, and adopting more standardized formats for sharing epidemiological metadata, might help make the DON more useful to researchers and policymakers.

Zoonotic Risk Technology Enters the Viral Emergence Toolkit (preprint)

In light of the urgency raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, global investment in wildlife virology is likely to increase, and new surveillance programs will identify hundreds of novel viruses that might someday pose a threat to humans. Our capacity to identify which viruses are capable of zoonotic emergence depends on the existence of a technology—a machine learning model or other informatic system—that leverages available data on known zoonoses to identify which animal pathogens could someday pose a threat to global health. We synthesize the findings of an interdisciplinary workshop on zoonotic risk technologies to answer the following questions: What are the prerequisites, in terms of open data, equity, and interdisciplinary collaboration, to the development and application of those tools? What effect could the technology have on global health? Who would control that technology, who would have access to it, and who would benefit from it? Would it improve pandemic prevention? Could it create new challenges?

Rights-Based Approaches to Preventing, Detecting, and Responding to Infectious Disease (preprint)

Human rights offer universal frameworks to advance justice in public health, codifying international standards to frame government obligations. Health-related human rights have evolved dramatically over the past thirty years to offer a normative framework for justice in preventing, detecting, and responding to infectious disease outbreaks. Where human rights were long neglected in international health debates, the advent of the HIV/AIDS pandemic response would operationalise human rights for public health, as advocates looked explicitly to human rights in framing public health efforts. In this period of heightened fear and emerging advocacy, policymakers first sought to implement human rights law in public health law—viewing discrimination as counterproductive to public health goals, abandoning coercive tools of public health, and applying human rights to focus on the individual risk behaviours leading to HIV transmission. By finding a link between public health and human rights, the health and human rights movement could move away from its early focus on the conflicts between public health goals and individual human rights, employing human rights to advance public health. However, infectious disease control efforts continue to challenge the notion that individual rights can best support population health. In the new millennium—from the 2005 revision of the International Health Regulations to the 2014 birth of the Global Health Security Agenda—policymakers have sought to balance infectious disease imperatives for the public’s health with individual dignity protections in human rights. Yet, national public health efforts continue to employ mechanisms that infringe individual rights—from the recent Ebola epidemics in Sub-Saharan Africa to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that threatens the world—with public health laws violating individual bodily integrity through vaccination mandates, violating individual medical privacy through surveillance and reporting, and violating individual liberty through quarantine and isolation.