Enhanced EPIRISK tool for rapid epidemic risk analysis

Objectives: This study aims to create an enhanced EPIRISK tool in order to correctly predict COVID-19 severity in various countries. The original EPIRISK tool was developed in 2018 to predict the epidemic risk and prioritise response. The tool was validated against nine historical outbreaks prior to 2020. However, it rated many high-income countries that had poor performance during the COVID-19 pandemic as having lower epidemic risk.Study design: This study was designed to modify EPIRISK by reparameterizing risk factors and validate the enhanced tool against different outbreaks, including COVID-19.Methods: We identified three factors that could be indicators of poor performance witnessed in some high-income countries: leadership, culture and universal health coverage. By adding these parameters to EPIRISK, we created a series of models for the calibration and validation. These were tested against nonCOVID outbreaks in nine countries and COVID-19 outbreaks in seven countries to identify the best -fit model. The COVID-19 severity was determined by the global incidence and mortality, which were equally divided into four levels. Results: The enhanced EPIRISK tool has 17 parameters, including seven disease-related and 10 country related factors, with an algorithm developed for risk level classification. It correctly predicted the risk levels of COVID-19 for all seven countries and all nine historical outbreaks.Conclusions: The enhanced EPIRSIK is a multifactorial tool that can be widely used in global infectious disease outbreaks for rapid epidemic risk analysis, assisting first responders, government and public health professionals with early epidemic preparedness and prioritising response to infectious disease outbreaks.(c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Royal Society for Public Health. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

The study aimed to enhance the EPIRISK tool for accurately predicting the severity of COVID-19 in different countries. By modifying the original tool and adding parameters related to leadership, culture, and universal health coverage, the enhanced EPIRISK tool correctly predicted the risk levels of COVID-19 in different countries and historical outbreaks. This multifactorial tool can assist with early epidemic preparedness and prioritizing response to infectious disease outbreaks.