Trends in Nationally Notifiable Infectious Diseases in Humans and Animals During the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Korea

Abstract

AbstractNon-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were implemented to cope with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in South Korea. These interventions could also have affected other infectious diseases, but there have been no comprehensive studies regarding their impacts. This study examined trends in notifiable infectious diseases in both humans and animals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models were developed for each disease using data from 2016 to 2019, and the incidences for 2020 to 2021 were predicted. Subsequently, the predicted numbers of cases were compared with actual observations. Our findings indicated a substantial reduction in human respiratory infectious diseases during implementation of NPIs. However, human gastrointestinal infectious diseases and livestock diseases did not show a significant decrease. The results revealed that the preventive effect sizes of NPIs varied among diseases and indicated the potential for side effects, suggesting that complementary interventions are needed to minimize these negative effects.