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

BMC Public Health

Simo Kitanovski¹  Daniel Hoffmann¹  Thomas Lengauer²  Barbara Gärtner³  Ortwin Adams⁴  Rolf Kaiser⁵  Gibran Horemheb-Rubio⁶ 

[1] Bioinformatics and Computational Biophysics, Faculty of Biology and Centre for Medical Biotechnology (ZMB), University of Duisburg-Essen, 45141, Essen, Germany;Computational Biology, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarland Informatics Campus, 66123, Saarbrücken, Germany;Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene, Saarland University Medical Center, 66421, Homburg, Germany;Institute of Virology, University Hospital Düsseldorf, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany;Institute of Virology, University of Cologne, Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital of Cologne, 50935, Cologne, Germany;Institute of Virology, University of Cologne, Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital of Cologne, 50935, Cologne, Germany;Department of Infectious Diseases, Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Médicas y Nutrición Salvador Zubirán, 14080, Mexico City, Mexico;

关键词: SARS-CoV-2;    COVID-19;    Rhinovirus;    Bayesian;    Modeling;    Germany;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12889-021-11178-w

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundNon-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.MethodsWe 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.ResultsWe 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]).ConclusionsRV 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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY