Preparing for Coming RSV, Influenza Epidemics

Nonpharmaceutical interventions slowed the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases but now, as NPIs are lifted, countries are seeing a resurgence in several respiratory diseases. In Chaos, scientists, using data from Hong Kong to develop their model, describe a threshold control method that can be used to predict the best time to lift NPIs without overwhelming the hospital systems when these other respiratory diseases inevitably surge back. They found that reintroducing NPI measures when a threshold of 600 severe cases is reached could ensure that the hospital system in Hong Kong is not overwhelmed by severely infected patients.