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Rhinovirus prevalence as indicator for efficacy of measures against SARS-CoV-2

BACKGROUND: Non-pharmaceutical measures to control the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) should be carefully tuned as they can impose a heavy social and economic burden. To quantify and possibly tune the efficacy of these anti-SARS-CoV-2 measures, we have devised...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Kitanovski, Simo, Horemheb-Rubio, Gibran, Adams, Ortwin, Gärtner, Barbara, Lengauer, Thomas, Hoffmann, Daniel, Kaiser, Rolf
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8215636/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34154549
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-11178-w
Descripción
Sumario:BACKGROUND: Non-pharmaceutical measures to control the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) should be carefully tuned as they can impose a heavy social and economic burden. To quantify and possibly tune the efficacy of these anti-SARS-CoV-2 measures, we have devised indicators based on the abundant historic and current prevalence data from other respiratory viruses. METHODS: We obtained incidence data of 17 respiratory viruses from hospitalized patients and outpatients collected by 37 clinics and laboratories between 2010-2020 in Germany. With a probabilistic model for Bayes inference we quantified prevalence changes of the different viruses between months in the pre-pandemic period 2010-2019 and the corresponding months in 2020, the year of the pandemic with noninvasive measures of various degrees of stringency. RESULTS: We discovered remarkable reductions δ in rhinovirus (RV) prevalence by about 25% (95% highest density interval (HDI) [−0.35,−0.15]) in the months after the measures against SARS-CoV-2 were introduced in Germany. In the months after the measures began to ease, RV prevalence increased to low pre-pandemic levels, e.g. in August 2020 δ=−0.14 (95% HDI [−0.28,0.12]). CONCLUSIONS: RV prevalence is negatively correlated with the stringency of anti-SARS-CoV-2 measures with only a short time delay. This result suggests that RV prevalence could possibly be an indicator for the efficiency for these measures. As RV is ubiquitous at higher prevalence than SARS-CoV-2 or other emerging respiratory viruses, it could reflect the efficacy of noninvasive measures better than such emerging viruses themselves with their unevenly spreading clusters. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at (10.1186/s12889-021-11178-w).