ABSTRACT
COVID-19 pandemic-related shifts in healthcare utilization, in combination with trends in non-COVID-19 disease transmission and NPI use, had clear impacts on infectious and chronic disease hospitalization rates. Using a national healthcare billing database (C19RDB), we estimated the monthly incidence rate ratio of hospitalizations between March 2020 and June 2021 according to 19 ICD-10 diagnostic chapters and 189 subchapters. The majority of hospitalization causes showed an immediate decline in incidence during March 2020. Hospitalizations for diagnoses such as reproductive neoplasms, hypertension, and diabetes returned to pre-pandemic norms in incidence during late 2020 and early 2021, while others, like those for infectious respiratory disease, never returned to pre-pandemic norms. These results are crucial for contextualizing future research, particularly time series analyses, utilizing surveillance and hospitalization data for non-COVID-19 disease. Our assessment of subchapter level primary hospitalization codes offers new insight into trends among less frequent causes of hospitalization during the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABSTRACT
As healthcare capacities in the US and Europe reach their limits due to a surge in the COVID-19 pandemic, both regions enter the 2020-2021 influenza season. Southern hemisphere countries that had suppressed influenza seasons provide a hopeful example, but the lack of reduction in influenza in the 2019-2020 influenza season and heterogeneity in nonpharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions show that we cannot assume the same effect will occur globally. The US and Europe must promote the implementation and continuation of these measures in order to prevent additional burden to healthcare systems due to influenza.
