An infodemic is an overflow of information of varying quality that surges across digital and physical environments during a health emergency. It leads to confusion, risk-taking and behaviours that can harm health and lead to erosion of trust in health authorities and public health responses. It also greatly impacts the work of public health intelligence (PHI) experts as the legendary “haystack” containing relevant signals for early detection of health threats becomes infinitely bigger. The infodemic accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic is just the latest and maybe most visible manifestation of this trend.

To set the scene of Day 3, the introductory session Tackling the Infodemic aims to establish a common ground on what constitutes a so-called infodemic and its tangible impacts on the PHI function. In this session, Oliver Morgan, Director of the Health Emergency Information and Risk Assessment Department at WHO, welcomes the participants and Tina Purnat, a WHO Technical Officer, explores how proper infodemic management can support the management of epidemics and of epidemic risk more specifically.  

On both tracks, conference host Philip AbdelMalik, who leads the EIOS Core Team at WHO, then goes on to discuss approaches helping to navigate and analyze the overabundance of structured and unstructured information for informed decision-making with various experts and EIOS collaborators. In the Navigating the Infodemic-sessions, they highlight and discuss related research projects, concepts and solutions aimed at supporting PHI practitioners to navigate the information overload, discover relevant information and make sense of it.