Predicting the impact of COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical intervention on short- and medium-term dynamics of enterovirus D68 in the US

Sang Woo Park; Kevin Messacar; Daniel C Douek; Alicen B Spaulding; C Jessica E Metcalf; Bryan T Grenfell

doi:10.1016/j.epidem.2023.100736

Predicting the impact of COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical intervention on short- and medium-term dynamics of enterovirus D68 in the US

Epidemics. 2024 Mar:46:100736. doi: 10.1016/j.epidem.2023.100736. Epub 2023 Dec 18.

Authors

Sang Woo Park¹, Kevin Messacar², Daniel C Douek³, Alicen B Spaulding³, C Jessica E Metcalf⁴, Bryan T Grenfell⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. Electronic address: swp2@princeton.edu.
² Department of Pediatrics, Section of Infectious Diseases, University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children's Hospital Colorado, Aurora, CO, USA.
³ Vaccine Research Center, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
⁴ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA; Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.

PMID: 38118274
DOI: 10.1016/j.epidem.2023.100736

Abstract

Recent outbreaks of enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) infections, and their causal linkage with acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), continue to pose a serious public health concern. During 2020 and 2021, the dynamics of EV-D68 and other pathogens have been significantly perturbed by non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19; this perturbation presents a powerful natural experiment for exploring the dynamics of these endemic infections. In this study, we analyzed publicly available data on EV-D68 infections, originally collected through the New Vaccine Surveillance Network, to predict their short- and long-term dynamics following the COVID-19 interventions. Although long-term predictions are sensitive to our assumptions about underlying dynamics and changes in contact rates during the NPI periods, the likelihood of a large outbreak in 2023 appears to be low. Comprehensive surveillance data are needed to accurately characterize future dynamics of EV-D68. The limited incidence of AFM cases in 2022, despite large EV-D68 outbreaks, poses further questions for the timing of the next AFM outbreaks.

Keywords: COVID- 19; Enterovirus D68; Non-pharmaceutical intervention; infectious disease moeling.

MeSH terms

COVID-19* / epidemiology
Central Nervous System Viral Diseases*
Disease Outbreaks
Enterovirus D, Human*
Enterovirus Infections* / epidemiology
Enterovirus Infections* / prevention & control
Humans
Myelitis* / epidemiology
Neuromuscular Diseases* / epidemiology

Supplementary concepts

acute flaccid myelitis