The WHO Disease Outbreak News during the Covid-19 pandemic (preprint)

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) was faced with the task of regular public updating--about both the pandemic itself, and hundreds or potentially thousands of other health emergencies. Here, we examined 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 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.

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.