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Enhancing Situational Awareness to Prevent Infectious Disease Outbreaks from Becoming Catastrophic

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Global Catastrophic Biological Risks

Part of the book series: Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology ((CT MICROBIOLOGY,volume 424))

Abstract

Catastrophic epidemics, if they occur, will very likely start from localized and far smaller (non-catastrophic) outbreaks that grow into much greater threats. One key bulwark against this outcome is the ability of governments and the health sector more generally to make informed decisions about control measures based on accurate understanding of the current and future extent of the outbreak. Situation reporting is the activity of periodically summarizing the state of the outbreak in a (usually) public way. We delineate key classes of decisions whose quality depends on high-quality situation reporting, key quantities for which estimates are needed to inform these decisions, and the traditional and novel sources of data that can aid in estimating these quantities. We emphasize the important role of situation reports as providing public, shared planning assumptions that allow decision makers to harmonize the response while making explicit the uncertainties that underlie the scenarios outlined for planning. In this era of multiple data sources and complex factors informing the interpretation of these data sources, we describe four principles for situation reporting: (1) Situation reporting should be thematic, concentrating on essential areas of evidence needed for decisions. (2) Situation reports should adduce evidence from multiple sources to address each area of evidence, along with expert assessments of key parameters. (3) Situation reports should acknowledge uncertainty and attempt to estimate its magnitude for each assessment. (4) Situation reports should contain carefully curated visualizations along with text and tables.

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Acknowledgments

ML was partially supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number U54GM088558. MS was partially supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01GM130668. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Epidemiology and Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02130, USA

    Marc Lipsitch

  2. Computational Health Informatics Program, Boston Children’s Hospital, 1 Autumn St, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    Mauricio Santillana

  3. Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, 25 Shattuck St, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Mauricio Santillana

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  1. Marc Lipsitch
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  2. Mauricio Santillana
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Correspondence to Marc Lipsitch .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Health Security, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Thomas V. Inglesby

  2. Center for Health Security, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Amesh A. Adalja

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Lipsitch, M., Santillana, M. (2019). Enhancing Situational Awareness to Prevent Infectious Disease Outbreaks from Becoming Catastrophic. In: Inglesby, T., Adalja, A. (eds) Global Catastrophic Biological Risks. Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology, vol 424. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/82_2019_172

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