Public reporting guidelines for outbreak data: Enabling accountability for effective outbreak response by developing standards for transparency and uniformity

Currently, there are few standards for what essential information about an infectious disease outbreak should be reported to the public and when. The content and timeliness of public reporting (e.g. situation reports) is at the discretion of the jurisdiction overseeing the outbreak response, resulting in a substantial heterogeneity in available information. To address this problem, we undertook a consensus process to develop recommendations for what epidemiological information public health authorities should report to the public during an outbreak, including the administrative level and frequency of reporting. We first assembled a steering committee of nine experts representing federal public health, state public health, academia, and international partners to develop a candidate list of reporting items. We then invited 45 experts, 35 of whom agreed to participate in a Delphi panel. Of those, 25 participated in voting in the first round, 25 participated in voting in the second round, and 25 participated in voting in the third round, demonstrating consistent engagement in the consensus-building process. The final stage of the Delphi process consisted of a hybrid consensus meeting to finalize the voting items. This resulted in a final list of nine reporting items representing the minimum set of information to include in publicly available situation reports: Numbers of new confirmed cases, new hospital admissions, new deaths, cumulative confirmed cases, cumulative hospital admissions, and cumulative deaths, each reported weekly and at Administrative level 1 (typically state or province), and stratified by sex, age group, and race/ethnicity. This minimum reporting standard creates a strong framework and guidance for uniform sharing of outbreak information and promotes consistency of data between jurisdictions to enable prompt and effective response.