Seasonal respiratory virus circulation was diminished during the COVID‐19 pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Measures introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic intended to address the spread of SARS-CoV-2 may also influence the incidence of other common seasonal respiratory viruses (SRV). This evaluation reports laboratory-confirmed cases of common SRV in a well-defined region of central Canada to address this issue. METHODS: Surveillance data for common non-SARS-CoV-2 SRV in Ottawa, Canada, was provided by the Eastern Ontario Regional Laboratory Association (EORLA) reference virology lab. Weekly reports of the number of positive tests and the proportion that yielded positive results were analyzed from August 26, 2018, to January 2, 2022. RESULTS: A drastic reduction in influenza and other common SRV was observed during the 2020-2021 influenza season in the Ottawa region. Influenza was virtually undetected post-SARS-CoV-2 emergence. Rhinoviruses and enteroviruses were the only viruses that remained relatively unaffected during this period. CONCLUSIONS: We speculated that the introduction of nonpharmaceutical measures including masking to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission contributed to the near absence of SRV in the Ottawa region. These measures should remain a key component in addressing spikes in SRV activity and future pandemics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".