Background During previous disease outbreaks, the World Health Organization developed a framework to guide national pandemic planning. The degree to which this framework supported the development of the current COVID-19 pandemic planning is not well understood. While there are opportunities for integrating priority setting in the four stages of the WHO pandemic planning framework, the degree to which its use supported countries to include priority setting in their plans has not been assessed.

Objective The purpose of this paper is to discuss the degree to which a sample of countries that used the WHO pandemic planning framework when developing their COVID-19 pandemic plans integrated priority setting and resource allocation in their plans.

Methods We retrieved and reviewed a sample of 86 COVID-19 pandemic plans from the six- WHO regions. We abstracted information on the degree to which they included quality indicators for priority setting. We also identified plans that explicitly mentioned that they based their plans on the WHO framework. We analyzed any alignment between the use of the framework and the inclusion of priority setting, further analysis focused on the aspects of priority setting that were included, and their alignment with the phases of the WHO framework.

Results Preliminary analysis indicates that only 19 countries reported to have used the WHO framework, most of these countries are from the AFRO-, EMRO- and SEARO regions. There was limited alignment between the countries that used the framework and those that integrated PS in their plans. This is a missed opportunity which could have been mitigated by integrating PS in the four phases of the WHO pandemic planning framework. This would extend and strengthen integrating PS in pandemic planning.