COVID-19 and the scaled-down 2020 Hajj Pilgrimage—Decisive, logical and prudent decision making by Saudi authorities overcomes pre-Hajj public health concerns

The abrupt appearance of SARS-CoV-2 as a novel lethal zoonotic pathogen causing COVID-19 disease in humans in late December 2019 (WHO, 2020), and its explosive global spread (Hui et al., 2020) caught health authorities worldwide by surprise and exposed the ill-preparedness of global public health systems to deal with the appearance of a new pathogen. Apart from generic prevention and control issues of public health and lockdown measures to limit epidemic spread, specific issues of Mass Gathering sporting and religious events came under specific spotlight (Alzahrani et al., 2020; Memish et al., 2020; Baloch et al., 2020; McCloskey et al., 2020; Petersen et al., 2020b).