Usefulness of national respiratory virus surveillance data for clinicians who manage adult patients

Abstract

The Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) provides weekly respiratory virus (RV) surveillance reports on its website (the KCDC data). Clinicians in clinical settings wherein the use of PCR for RVs is not a routine laboratory test for adult patients with acute respiratory illness (ARI) may question the clinical utility of such a national RV surveillance dataset in predicting RV outbreaks among their adult patients. We compared the KCDC data to the RV PCR data of adult patients who visited a tertiary care center. During a period of 108 weeks, a total of 6955 (5598 pediatric and 1257 adult) patients underwent RV PCR tests for ARI; most of these tests were administered while the patients were admitted (n = 6,920; 99.5%). From the KCDC website, we collected the RV PCR test results of 22 540 patients. Three graphs of weekly positivity rates were made for adults, children, and the KCDC data per each RV, and these graphs were then compared with one another. Whereas RV outbreaks were coincident between the KCDC and the adult graph with respect to influenza virus, respiratory syncytial virus, human metapneumovirus, and human coronavirus, the same was not true for human bocavirus, parainfluenza virus, rhinovirus, and adenovirus. However, a negative predictive value of the KCDC data in the prediction of the occurrence of an outbreak in the adult graph was high for the respective eight RVs (85-100%). A national RV surveillance dataset may be useful in identifying RV outbreaks in adult patients with severe ARI.