Outbreak response includes aspects of general disease control such as maintaining adequate hygiene, but may also include responses that extend beyond traditional healthcare settings and are unique to an outbreak, such as physical distancing, contact tracing, mapping of disease clusters, or quarantine.

Outbreak response is normally conducted by teams, which include infection control physicians, epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists and a number of other specialties.

[1] This helps decrease the risk of health services being overwhelmed and providing more time for a vaccine and treatment to be developed.

[2] Another strategy, suppression, requires more extreme long-term non-pharmaceutical interventions so as to reverse the pandemic by reducing the basic reproduction number to less than 1.

The suppression strategy, which include stringent population-wide social distancing, home isolation of cases and household quarantine, was undertaken by China during the COVID-19 pandemic where entire cities were placed under lockdown, but such strategy carries with it considerable social and economic costs.