Modeling the impact of COVID-19 on future tuberculosis burden

Mario Tovar; Alberto Aleta; Joaquín Sanz; Yamir Moreno

doi:10.1038/s43856-022-00145-0

Modeling the impact of COVID-19 on future tuberculosis burden

Commun Med (Lond). 2022 Jun 29:2:77. doi: 10.1038/s43856-022-00145-0. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Mario Tovar^{1

2}, Alberto Aleta³, Joaquín Sanz^{1

2}, Yamir Moreno^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI), University of Zaragoza, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain.
² Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Zaragoza, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain.
³ ISI Foundation, Via Chisola 5, 10126 Torino, Italy.

Abstract
in English, Spanish

Background: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has greatly disrupted our everyday life, forcing the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions in many countries and putting public health services and healthcare systems worldwide under stress. These circumstances are leading to unintended effects such as the increase in the burden of other diseases.

Methods: Here, using a data-driven epidemiological model for tuberculosis (TB) spreading, we describe the expected rise in TB incidence and mortality if COVID-associated changes in TB notification are sustained and attributable entirely to disrupted diagnosis and treatment adherence.

Results: Our calculations show that the reduction in diagnosis of new TB cases due to the COVID-19 pandemic could result in 228k (CI 187-276) excess deaths in India, 111k (CI 93-134) in Indonesia, 27k (CI 21-33) in Pakistan, and 12k (CI 9-18) in Kenya.

Conclusions: We show that it is possible to reverse these excess deaths by increasing the pre-covid diagnosis capabilities from 15 to 50% for 2 to 4 years. This would prevent almost all TB-related excess mortality that could be caused by the COVID-19 pandemic if no additional preventative measures are introduced. Our work therefore provides guidelines for mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on tuberculosis epidemic in the years to come.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted everyday life and put public health services and healthcare systems worldwide under stress. This has compromised the ability to control other diseases such as Malaria, Cancer and Tuberculosis. In this work we predict the rise in Tuberculosis occurrence and mortality when healthcare systems are impacted and diagnosis capabilities blocked in 4 countries where TB is prevalent. Our calculations show that an increase in new TB cases due to the COVID-19 pandemic could result in almost 400,000 additional deaths from TB in India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Kenya. We also show that increased diagnosis capabilities after the pandemic could reduce the additional deaths from TB resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic impact.

Keywords: Tuberculosis; Viral infection.

Abstract in English, Spanish

Abstract
in English, Spanish