Syndromic surveillance performance in Canada throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, March 1, 2020 to March 4, 2023
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted the need for robust surveillance of respiratory viruses. Syndromic surveillance continues to be an important surveillance component recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). While FluWatchers, Canada's syndromic surveillance system, has been in place since 2015, the COVID-19 pandemic provided a valuable opportunity to expand the program's scope and underlying technology infrastructure. Following some structural changes to FluWatchers syndromic questionnaire, participants are now able to contribute valuable data to the non-specific surveillance of respiratory virus activity across Canada. This article examines the performance of FluWatchers' syndromic surveillance over the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. More specifically, this article examines FluWatchers' performance with respect to the correlation between the FluWatchers influenza-like illness (ILI) and acute respiratory infection (ARI) indicators and total respiratory virus detections (RVDs) in Canada, including influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and other respiratory viruses.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".