PREVALENCE OF 16 RESPIRATORY VIRUSES DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN SOUTHWEST REGION OF KOREA

INTRO: SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged in January 2020 in Korea, and the COVID-19 pandemic changed quarantine policy, personal hygiene awareness, social contact policy, and so on. Therefore, prevalence of diseases has also changed. We investigated the prevalence of 16 respiratory viruses during the COVID-19 pandemic period. METHODS: We analyzed 20,513 sputum specimens of patients with acute respiratory symptoms from over 350 hospitals in southwest region of Korea for 2 years (July 2020-June 2022) to determine positive rates of detection using the Allplex Respiratory Panel 1/2/3 (Seegene, Republic of Korea) which is a multiplex real-time PCR assay by month. FINDINGS: The positive rate of most respiratory viruses was less than 5% at the early period (July 2020-June 2021) of COVID-19 pandemic, except for adenovirus, human rhinovirus and human bocavirus (hBoV). The positive rate of most respiratory viruses tends to decrease during the period of rapid increase in the number of COVID-19 infections except for coronavirus OC43 and hBoV. The positive rates of respiratory syncytial virus A, respiratory syncytial virus B, and parainfluenza virus 3 increased during the cold season just before the rapid increase in the number of COVID-19 infections. Influenza virus positivity was very low (<2%) during the COVID-19 pandemic. DISCUSSION: The low positive rate of most respiratory viruses in the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic may be related to strict quarantine policy at that time. CONCLUSION: The patterns of outbreaks of other respiratory viruses vary from virus to virus during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rapid increase in the number of COVID-19 infections during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the prevalence of other respiratory viruses.