How the Situation Room works

Every report comes from a public-health authority: WHO Disease Outbreak News, the WHO Weekly Epidemiological Record, WHO Western Pacific surveillance updates, the ECDC Communicable Disease Threats Report, ECDC public health event pages, Africa CDC statements and weekly intelligence reports, and PAHO epidemiological alerts. News media are not used.

GIDS downloads each report in full, including tables, and keeps the text and the original file internally so the models read what the report says, not just its headline. The full text and the PDF are never republished.

A model turns each report into zero or more alerts. An alert is one disease in one place (a country, and a province or city when the report names one) with its status (new, ongoing, imported, ended, routine), the case and death counts and their date as the report states them, and one sentence quoted from the report. Counts the report does not state stay empty. A report on one outbreak in three countries gives three points that open onto the same timeline. A routine weekly roundup with nothing unusual gives no point and is listed under monitoring products.

Many models read a PDF directly and keep its tables and layout. For those models GIDS sends the original file. For models that only take text, or when a model rejects the file, GIDS sends the extracted text instead. Each alert records which of the two was used.

An author model drafts the alerts and an independent reviewer model audits them against the same report, then accepts, asks for a revision or rejects. Deterministic checks run first: disease ids and country codes must exist in the GIDS catalogue, the quoted sentence must appear word for word in the report, and every count must be a number that appears in it. Anything that fails a check is dropped. Only accepted output is published and there is no human gate. If only one model route exists, the same model reviews its own draft and the alert is labelled as single-model review.

The public page keeps only structured facts, one sentence quoted word for word from the report, and a link to the original. The quotation is there so a reader can check each alert against its source; it is a short excerpt for attribution, never the report itself, and the full text is not republished. Every source is quoted this way unless its terms forbid any reuse. Rights holders who object can ask for a quotation to be removed.

Points updated in the last 7 days come first and are drawn in the strongest colour; older points fade. No model assigns a risk level. Outbreaks group alerts of one disease that one report names together, or that fall in the same country within 60 days; an outbreak with no alert for 30 days is shown as quiet.

Coverage follows what these authorities publish: countries that report little to international bodies appear rarely. A reading can still contain an error that both models missed, and a long report can have places the models skipped. The original report is always authoritative. This is not clinical guidance.