Abstract:
During the pandemic outdoor activities were encouraged to mitigate transmission risk while providing safe spaces for social interactions. Human behaviour, which may favour or disfavour, contact rates between questing ticks and humans, is a key factor impacting tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) incidence. We analyzed annual and weekly TBE cases in Finland, Norway and Sweden from 2010 to 2021 to assess trend, seasonality, and discuss changes in human tick exposure imposed by COVID-19. We compared the pre-pandemic incidence (2010-2019) with the pandemic incidence (2020-2021) by fitting a generalized linear model (GLM) to incidence data. Pre-pandemic incidence was 1.0, 0.29 and 2.8 for Finland, Norway and Sweden, respectively, compared to incidence of 2.2, 1.0 and 3.9 during the pandemic years. However, there was an increasing trend for all countries across the whole study period. Therefore, we predicted the number of cases in 2020/2021 based on a model fitted to the annual cases in 2010-2019. The incidences during the pandemic were 1.3 times higher for Finland, 1.7 times higher for Norway and no difference for Sweden. When social restrictions were enforced to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2 there were profound changes in outdoor recreational behavior. Future consideration of public health interventions that promote outdoor activities may increase exposure to vector-borne diseases.
摘要:
在大流行期间,鼓励户外活动以减轻传播风险,同时为社交互动提供安全空间。人类行为,可能赞成或不赞成,寻找蜱和人类之间的接触率,是影响蜱传脑炎(TBE)发病率的关键因素。我们分析了芬兰每年和每周的TBE病例,挪威和瑞典从2010年到2021年评估趋势,季节性,并讨论COVID-19对人类蜱虫暴露的影响。我们通过将广义线性模型(GLM)拟合到发病率数据,比较了大流行前发病率(2010-2019年)和大流行发病率(2020-2021年)。芬兰的大流行前发病率为1.0、0.29和2.8,挪威和瑞典,分别,相比之下,大流行年份的发病率为2.2、1.0和3.9。然而,在整个研究期间,所有国家都有增加的趋势。因此,我们根据适合2010-2019年年度病例的模型预测了2020/2021年的病例数.大流行期间芬兰的发病率高1.3倍,挪威高出1.7倍,瑞典则无差异。当实施社会限制以遏制SARS-CoV-2的传播时,户外娱乐行为发生了深刻的变化。未来考虑促进户外活动的公共卫生干预措施可能会增加媒介传播疾病的暴露。