Resilience as a measure of preparedness for pandemic influenza outbreaks.

Abstract

The global crisis generated by COVID-19 has heightened awareness of pandemic outbreaks. From a public health preparedness standpoint, it is essential to assess the impact of a pandemic and also the resilience of the affected communities, which is the ability to withstand and recover quickly after a pandemic outbreak. The infection attack rate has been the common metric to assess community response to a pandemic outbreak, while it focuses on the number of infected it does not capture other dimensions such as the recovery time. The aim of this research is to develop community resilience measures and demonstrate their estimation using a simulated pandemic outbreak in a region in the USA. Three scenarios are analysed with different combinations of virus transmissibility rates and non-pharmaceutical interventions. I The inclusion of the resilience framework in the pandemics outbreak analysis will enable decision makers to capture the multi dimensional nature of community response.