ESCAPE: Preparing for the next pandemic before it arrives

When COVID-19 began to spread across the world, governments, health authorities and scientists were forced to respond at extraordinary speed. Decisions had to be taken quickly, often with incomplete information, against a backdrop of uncertainty, public anxiety and mounting pressure on health systems. For all the scientific advances made during the pandemic, the crisis also exposed how fragile the relationship can be between data, analysis and decision-making when a new infectious threat emerges.

That is the space in which the ESCAPE project is working. Rather than focusing on a single pathogen, ESCAPE is aiming to strengthen pandemic preparedness at a more structural level, asking how Europe can be better equipped to understand an emerging threat early, assess its likely impact and support policymakers with tools and evidence that are both scientifically robust and practically useful.

For Professor Niel Hens, the roots of the project lie directly in the experience of COVID-19 and the work that many of the partners had already undertaken during the crisis. “We were heavily involved in the COVID-19 pandemic in another European project called EpiPose,” he explains. “Six out of the eight partners that are in this project as well were already involved in that one.”

That earlier work was focused on informing policymakers as effectively as possible through modelling. “We looked at many, many different things, all with the aim of informing policymakers as much as possible with modelling outcomes,” Hens says. “So that means forecasting, that means scenario analysis and so on – what-if scenarios. What if you do this? What will then happen in terms of hospital load and so on?”

That support was vital during the acute phase of the pandemic. But as the immediate emergency began to ease, it became clear that there was more to do in terms of ensuring Europe was prepared for any future pandemic. The experience had revealed not only the importance of rapid scientific input, but also the limitations of existing preparedness systems. “The whole idea after the EpiPose project, or at the end of the acute phase of the pandemic at least, was that we couldn’t stop there, that we had to look into how we can actually improve things for the future,” Hens adds.

Pandemic intelligence
This shift in thinking underpins ESCAPE’s central concept: pandemic intelligence, the underlying logic of which is clear. In Hens’ words, “preparedness is not simply about having plans on paper. It is about knowing what kind of threat is emerging, understanding its defining features quickly enough to make a difference, and making sure that the right evidence reaches the right people in time to shape action. ”

“If we want to be better prepared, we need to know what’s coming at us and we need to provide tools to people, the data to people and so on, to be exploited in time to react when the pandemic hits,” Hens says.

At the start of any pandemic, that means one thing above all: understanding the pathogen. Hens points to the importance of core disease characteristics such as the incubation period, the generation interval and the extent of asymptomatic spread. These are not obscure technical details. They determine how quickly a disease can propagate, how visible it is likely to be and whether it can be contained through conventional public health measures or requires broader behavioural interventions.

Taken together, these characteristics help scientists build an early picture of the threat. They show how long it takes for symptoms to appear, how quickly infection passes from one person to another and how much transmission may be happening unnoticed. Asymptomatic spread is especially important. “If there is a lot of it you will fail to detect and isolate infected individuals in time,” Hens says. “You can’t stop it because you don’t know it’s there, basically. People then won’t change their behaviour and the disease propagates quite quickly.”

Combined with the basic reproduction number, which indicates transmission potential, these parameters begin to define both the scale of the problem and the kind of response required. In other words, good preparedness starts not with a political decision, but with a scientific picture of what is unfolding.

Yet COVID-19 showed that having data in principle is not the same as being able to use it in practice. According to Hens, one of the major difficulties lay not only in data availability, but in accessibility – how quickly it could be shared, interpreted and translated into action. In many cases, the problem was not the absence of data, but the absence of systems and relationships needed to connect it to decision-making. Some countries had well-established links between academic experts and national public health systems, allowing evidence to flow more easily into policy discussions. Others had to build these connections in real time, often under intense pressure.

“Some countries are well-organised,” he says, citing the UK as an example. “But for a lot of countries, including Belgium and other countries, this was not set up and needed to be set up quickly. This was not always the best way.”

Addressing that gap is a central part of ESCAPE’s work. Rather than focusing only on generating new data, the project is working to ensure that evidence can move more effectively from research into decision-making. This includes developing tools and building closer, ongoing relationships between modelling teams and public health institutions.  By engaging policymakers throughout the project, ESCAPE aims to ensure that the systems, tools and data pipelines needed in a crisis are already in place, rather than having to be built under pressure when the next pandemic arrives.

Planning with archetypes
Understanding a pathogen is only part of the challenge. Preparing for the unknown requires a different way of thinking, and one of ESCAPE’s other distinctive ideas is that preparedness should not revolve solely around anticipating one named pathogen after another. Public discussion often defaults to familiar threats – influenza, another coronavirus, or the as-yet undefined “next COVID”. ESCAPE is trying to move beyond that logic and instead is working to identify archetypes of pathogens with pandemic potential. This means clustering diseases according to defining characteristics that shape how they spread and how they might best be controlled.

“We’ve taken a different route,” Hens says. “We’ve tried to investigate these key characteristics for pathogens with pandemic potential. And what we’re trying to define is archetypes of pathogens rather than pathogens themselves one by one.”

This approach could prove highly valuable for preparedness planning. Rather than producing isolated plans for individual diseases, it allows researchers and policymakers to think in more transferable categories. “Using different archetypes allows you to cluster some of these pathogens and then to develop preparedness plans specifically for the archetypes rather than for each pathogen on its own,” Hens explains.

The concept is still developing and, as he notes, still needs to be more fully picked up by the scientific community. But its practical value is already evident. A pathogen characterised by high levels of pre-symptomatic transmission, for example, poses a very different challenge from a vector-borne disease. Grouping such threats by shared behaviour opens the door to more flexible, anticipatory planning.

That principle also helps explain why ESCAPE is not simply a retrospective exercise in pandemic lessons learned. It is trying to create a system that can be activated early, even when the precise identity of a pathogen is not yet fully understood.

Tools for foresight
If archetypes provide the conceptual framework, ESCAPE’s tools are designed to make that framework usable in practice. The project is developing tools that public health experts and policymakers can use to explore the likely consequences of different response options. Here, Hens is careful with language, choosing not to use the word prediction. For him, the strength of modelling lies elsewhere. “It’s scenario analysis,” he says. “I always compare it to being on a boat and it’s very foggy and you need to find your way. At least that spotlight on the boat will give you a direction. It will not say you’re going to land exactly there, but at least it will give you some kind of foresight.”

It’s an important distinction. The value of modelling is not that it tells governments exactly what will happen. It allows them to test the implications of choices before making them: what happens if certain contacts are reduced, if schools close, if working patterns change, if contact tracing is scaled up early, or if the pathogen has a particular transmission profile?

ESCAPE is now moving towards making some of these tools available. Hens describes an app in development that will allow users to vary parameters and simulate likely trajectories. Initially, this is aimed more at public health professionals than direct public communication, and he remains cautious about over-simplification. Some modelling outputs are not easily translated into a public-facing interface without risking misunderstanding. Still, the ambition is clear: to create tools that help decision-makers explore what-if scenarios in a more structured and accessible way.

Just as importantly, ESCAPE is not assuming that such tools can simply be handed over from scientists to policymakers in a one-way transaction. Hens emphasises repeatedly that this must be a conversation. “It needs to be some kind of co-creation,” he says. “They have the boots on the ground.”

That means the project is actively engaging policymakers to understand what they need, how they would use the tools and what level of complexity would be useful in practice. This translation from the technical to policy usability is, he admits, proving harder and slower than first anticipated, but is essential if the science is to provide value on the ground.

The human factor
If COVID-19 revealed anything, it was that pandemic control is not just an epidemiological challenge, it is also a behavioural one. People’s actions shape transmission, their trust shapes compliance and their interpretation of official messages shapes whether policies work as intended.

Hens is clear on this: “COVID-19 has been very much about how people behave,” he says. “That is why ESCAPE includes work on behavioural data, including contact patterns collected across 20 European countries. These data proved more useful than expected, helping researchers understand how social mixing changed and what that meant for transmission under different restrictions.”

The project is also exploring whether mobility data, such as that held by telecom operators or major digital platforms, might offer a more readily available proxy for contact behaviour in future outbreaks. The goal is not to eliminate the need for dedicated studies, but to reduce delay and cost at the start of a crisis.

Beyond contact data, however, lies a deeper question: what counts as success in a pandemic response? One of ESCAPE’s approaches is examining this directly. COVID-19 often reduced public debate about the success of various policies to a narrow epidemiological frame: cases, hospitalisations, deaths. But societies were also grappling with isolation, disruption, education loss, economic harm and long-term effects on quality of life.

Hens notes that this broader perspective emerged as a key challenge. “What do policymakers believe is a success if you want to fight the pandemic?” he asks. “Is that keeping the burden in hospitals at bay? Or is it something more than that?”

ESCAPE is working with a large database of such determinants, using quality of life as a key indicator. This reflects a broader and more realistic understanding of preparedness – one that does not isolate health outcomes from the social conditions in which they unfold.

Trust, too, remains central and ESCAPE has explored how communication can be improved, including discussions with science journalists about what they would need in a future crisis. One strong message was the importance of rapid, reliable fact sheets on emerging pathogens. In response, the project is also looking at AI-supported tools that can rapidly gather and synthesise evidence from multiple sources to support early reviews of key disease parameters.

For Hens, the challenge is not just generating evidence, but embedding habits of communication and cooperation before the next emergency begins. “If we can do it in peacetime, then it will be easier to rely on that in crisis times as well,” he says.

What next?
ESCAPE will not solve every weakness exposed by COVID-19. Hens is realistic about the complexity of political systems, the unevenness of European coordination and the fact that science can advise but not decide. But the project’s contribution could nevertheless be significant.

At its core, ESCAPE is trying to reduce the time lost at the beginning of a pandemic: the time it takes to understand a threat, to interpret early signals, to organise evidence, to build confidence around emerging findings and to turn science into action. That matters because delay, as COVID-19 demonstrated, can be profoundly costly.

Looking ahead, Hens hopes the project will leave behind more than a set of isolated outputs. He wants it to help change the way preparedness itself is understood. “We hope that we can show people that you can actually work with archetypes, that that’s the way to go, not looking only at specific pathogens,” he says.

He is also clear that the work will not end with the formal close of the project. The collaborations behind ESCAPE are longstanding, and the ambition will continue beyond the current funding period. “We’re a bit stubborn,” he says. “We will continue to develop the systems to be ready before the next pandemic arrives.”