Over the past three years, the attention of health authorities around the world has been focused on the SARS-CoV2 virus and the consequences of the pandemic. After a three-year period, the European Center for Disease Control (ECDC) and the World Health Organization issued technical guidelines for the establishment of unified surveillance systems for respiratory viral infections.

As such, they highlighted the need to strengthen infection surveillance for both SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses that typically cause significant numbers of cases, especially during the winter months. Surveillance recommendations include the most common pathogens such as influenza virus and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

In this context and in accordance with the recommendations of international organizations, EODI strengthened existing surveillance systems and introduced new records to better reflect the epidemiological picture in the country for all three viruses.

Single epidemiological report

The unified epidemiological report will include data on:

i) Surveillance of cases (positive rate), hospitalizations, intubations and deaths from covid-19, combined with genomic surveillance results and the urban wastewater surveillance network,

ii) primary health care (PHC) sentinel surveillance, which will include the percentage of people with symptoms in the community as well as the number of ICU admissions,

iii) respiratory virus laboratory surveillance by the sentinel network; and iv) laboratory surveillance of a sample of people presenting with EODY Mobile Health Teams (MOHG) with symptoms of influenza-like symptoms.

The report will be published every Thursday starting Thursday 12/22/2022.

The single report will replace the COVID-19 epidemiological report published every Tuesday. The COVID-19 report for the current week (12/20/2022) will be published as usual.

Source: RES-IPE