The WHO Disease Outbreak News during the Covid-19 pandemic

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) was faced with the task of regular public updating—about both the pandemic itself, and hundreds or potentially thousands of other health emergencies. Here, we examined the 242 reports published in the WHO Disease Outbreak News (DON) during the first four years of the Covid-19 pandemic (2020 to 2023), and document the diseases and regions that were reported. We find that multinational epidemics of diseases like Ebola virus and MERS-CoV continue to dominate the DON. However, recent years have also seen more reports of climate-sensitive infectious diseases, as well as a state shift in influenza outbreak reporting in both China and the rest of the world. Surprisingly, the DON was only minimally used to document the Covid-19 pandemic and the global mpox epidemic, almost exclusively before the declaration of a public health emergency of international concern. Notably, inconsistent reporting related to Covid-19 variants of concern speaks to the ongoing evolution of the DON as a resource, and potentially, to its complicated relationship with international travel and trade restrictions. We suggest that researchers should continue to exercise caution when treating the DON as a global record of outbreak history, but that the DON is a compelling record of the WHO itself, including the process it uses to assess outbreak risk. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Funding Statement No funding to report. ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable. Yes The updated dataset, and all code to reproduce our analyses (all conducted in R v4.3.1), are all available in a public GitHub repository (github.com/cghss/dons2).