WHO declares the end of the COVID-19 global health emergency: lessons and recommendations from the perspective of ChatGPT/GPT-4

Dear Editor, On 5 May 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic would no longer be listed as a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), 3 years after the first PHEIC alert on 30 January 2020. The WHO committee highlighted the reduction in death rates and hospitalizations, along with the increased levels of population immunity against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), as reasons for ending the PHEIC status. To some extent, this could be regarded as a symbol of the end of the global COVID-19 pandemic and we are witnessing a turning point of the most severe emergent infectious disease pandemic in the 21st century. Moreover, as we know that artificial intelligence (AI) technology includes machine learning, deep learning, data analysis, and data mining, is an important scientific approach to studying the spread routes, spread processes, and epidemic laws of infectious diseases and has played a critical role in effective prevention, control, and elimination of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, some scholars believe that AI-enabled clinical trials might be a faster way to conduct rapid clinical trials and counter future pandemics. In addition, when referring to AI, an exponentially growing AI application called ChatGPT, a general large language model (LLM) developed by OpenAI company, has attracted substantial interest from researchers. GPT refers to Generative Pre-training Transformer and GPT-4 is the latest version of OpenAI’s LLM system. Recently, numerous studies have explored the potential of ChatGPT/GPT-4 in the biomedical field, including medical imaging, virtual assistant, clinical decisionmaking support, health management, precision medicine, and so on. As for the field of infectious diseases, our research group has analyzed the most concerned questions about the use of ChatGPT in the infectious disease domain. Additionally, several scholars also acquired answers and recommendations from ChatGPT on the frequently asked questions about COVID-19, such as spread, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, vaccines, and pandemic management. At the time point of WHO announced the end of COVID-19 PHEIC, we conducted an online survey using GPT-4 (https://chat.openai.com/chat).