GETTING TO BETTER PANDEMIC AND EPIDEMIC PREPAREDNESS AND RESPONSE

The earlier we can detect and identify health threats, the faster we can respond and the more lives we can save…not to mention the impact on other aspects of societies and economies, as we clearly see through COVID-19 and other infectious disease events in our history. But responding faster requires us to do something with those things that we detect earlier first. It requires us to transform what we get through surveillance systems and the other vast amounts of information available to us in our increasingly digital world to intelligence that can then lead to appropriate actions. This should inform our collective priorities for surveillance; we need to ask ourselves how we can improve our intelligence so that the decisions that are made and the policies that are put in place are better informed, more timely and, ultimately, more effective in protecting lives and livelihoods. Seeking to address this very question, and in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization's Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence was created. This presentation will provide an overview of some of the intelligence work preceding its creation through the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources (EIOS) initiative and highlight some of its key activities and ambitions moving forward.