Surveillance systems are vital for detecting adjustments in disease patterns and can serve as early warning systems for emerging disease outbreaks. The WHO Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS) is a network of centres and laboratories in 123 WHO Member States that collect breath samples. for influenza testing. Data from those labs is obtained through FluNet, a web-based tool for tracking flu trends.
In the new study, Cobb and colleagues assessed influenza-negative ILI outliers in 2020 against trends over the past five years in 28 countries with established ILI surveillance and a peak incidence of COVID-19. The team found that in 16 countries, the outliers in this dataset preceded the first reported COVID-19 spikes with an average delay of 13. 3 weeks.
The first outliers occurred during the week of January 13, 2020 in Peru, the Philippines, Poland, and Spain. In the United States and the United Kingdom, outliers in the dataset were detectable the week of March 9, 2020, four to 6 weeks before the first week of the reported PEAK of COVID-19. Delays of more than 20 weeks have been observed in some countries. The researchers say those outliers would possibly constitute an undetected spread of COVID-19 in early 2020, though one limitation is that it was unimaginable to assess SAR-CoV-2 positivity during this period.
The findings “underscore the importance of strengthening regimen disease surveillance networks for the ability to identify new diseases and count public health responses globally,” the researchers say.
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