Infectious disease pandemic planning and response: Incorporating decision analysis

Abstract

• Planning is critical to mitigating the sudden and potentially catastrophic impact of an infectious disease pandemic on society. National pandemic policy documents cover a wide variety of control options, often with nonspecific recommendations for action. • Despite advances in analytical methods for gaining early situational awareness (i.e., of a disease's transmissibility and severity) and for predicting the likely effectiveness of interventions, a major gap exists globally in terms of integrating these outputs with the advice contained in policy documents. • Decision models (and decision science as a field, more broadly) provide an approach to defining and evaluating alternative policy op..