Although the COVID-19 pandemic has subsided, the risk of the outbreak of new emerging infectious diseases remained constantly present. As such an outbreak can have devastating consequences to the society and economy, development of warning strategies before it takes place is a critical and urgent research task. However, there are currently no validated methods that are both effective and practically feasible for giving pre-outbreak alerts. As such, timely identification and rapid response after an outbreak takes place is still a feasible and effective method for responding to new emerging infectious diseases. The speed and efficiency of the response are largely contingent upon preparedness during the inter-epidemic periods. This paper aims to outline our thinking about the framework for infectious disease early warning and propose some recommendations. Implementation of such a strategy in practice necessitates the establishment of pilot initiatives to test the early warning system according to our proposed principles. These pilots may use severe influenza or hypothetical outbreak scenarios as examples, define warning signals, develop the mechanisms for epidemiological investigation, reporting and response so as to conduct feasibility assessments.
Tang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.