School of Public Health, LKS Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China.
School of Nursing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China.
Int J Infect Dis. 2020 Dec;101:323-325. doi: 10.1016/j.ijid.2020.09.1474. Epub 2020 Oct 1.
The COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, Hubei, China, followed the seasonal influenza epidemic. Since some COVID-19 cases may have been misdiagnosed as seasonal influenza in January 2020, before testing capacity was adequate, it is relevant to study the proportions of influenza and COVID-19 cases among influenza-like-illness (ILI) patients and their temporal pattern.
This study analyzed the record of the ILI patients with a recent travel history to Wuhan who arrived in Hong Kong between 31 December 2019 and 21 January 2020. We found that the proportion of COVID-19 cases among the total ILI patients is much smaller than a study among ILI in Wuhan. This difference in proportion could be due to the difference in sampling. We argue that it is essential to consider both samples when inferring the number of COVID-19 cases from ILI patients.
中国湖北省武汉市的 COVID-19 疫情紧随季节性流感疫情之后。由于在 2020 年 1 月检测能力不足之前，一些 COVID-19 病例可能被误诊为季节性流感，因此研究流感样疾病（ILI）患者中流感和 COVID-19 病例的比例及其时间模式具有相关性。
本研究分析了 2019 年 12 月 31 日至 2020 年 1 月 21 日期间抵达香港的有武汉近期旅行史的 ILI 患者的记录。我们发现，COVID-19 病例在总 ILI 患者中的比例远低于武汉的 ILI 研究。这种比例差异可能是由于采样的差异。我们认为，在从 ILI 患者推断 COVID-19 病例数量时，必须同时考虑两个样本。
