The WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence; supporting better preparedness for future health emergencies

Since 2016, when the World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Programme was established, WHO has transformed its capabilities to reliably prepare for, detect, and respond to emerging threats and humanitarian crises around the world. Every month, WHO identifies 4,500 signals of public health events and in 2020, WHO responded to 116 emergencies in 194 countries, territories, and areas [1]. The recent coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has exemplified that surveillance of emerging threats remains challenging, owing to a number of limitations, including data fragmentation and information systems that are not interoperable, limited integration of health information with other contextual information, such as climate information and social factors, little standardisation of analytical tools and methods, difficulties in assessing the effectiveness of public health interventions in real time, sub-optimal use of data-driven insights for public health decision-making [2] and, importantly, a weak global trust architecture for data and information sharing [3].