The COVID-19 pandemic has broached concerns about the world’s collective ability to detect, report, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks. Outbreak reporting is the process by which infectious disease outbreaks, once detected, are reported to public health officials; initial reporting to local public health officials is typically followed by escalation of the report to more senior public health authorities and, where necessary, to the international community to formulate an appropriate outbreak response. Timely outbreak reporting in turn can make the difference between containing an outbreak at its source and an outbreak growing into an epidemic or pandemic. However, countries continue to experience reporting delays or failures. To prevent future pandemics, it is crucial to understand the reasons for reporting shortfalls to develop appropriate solutions.

Much research has examined this issue in depth given its critical importance to global health security. However, a critical gap remains in understanding the barriers and enablers to reporting at the local level among public health officials across varying socioeconomic, political, and geographic contexts. Therefore, this project will begin with a mixed methods examination of the outbreak reporting experiences and observations of Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP) trainees and graduates, who often are at the frontline of outbreak detection, reporting, and response. The target programs for this study will be FETPs across the Asia Pacific region. Next, this project will experimentally investigate the factors that influence whether or not public health officials at various levels of the outbreak reporting chain report an outbreak. Finally, this project will conclude with a policy proposal to improve outbreak reporting based on the evidence generated in the first two project phases.