Surveillance by age-class and prefecture for emerging infectious febrile diseases with respiratory symptoms, including COVID-19

Tomoaki Ueno; Junko Kurita; Tamie Sugawara; Yoshiyuki Sugishita; Yasushi Ohkusa; Hirokazu Kawanohara; Miwako Kamei

The novel Coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak emerged in late 2019, subsequently expanding to 93,090 laboratory-confirmed cases and 3,018 deaths reported by WHO as of March 6 [1] . In Japan, excluding cruise ships, 349 cases including asymptomatic cases were confirmed, from which six patients died. However, most have been diagnosed as mild cases as of March 6, 2020 [2] . The epidemiological linkage of transmission was probably untraceable already in Japan as of February 18, 2020, as it was in Wuhan. At that time, cluster identification was necessary, but rapid testing was unavailable. Therefore, physicians have been unable to diagnose potential patients especially if they have mild symptoms. Therefore, syndromic surveillance is expected to be as useful as traditional surveillance based on diagnosis by physicians. The present study examines Prescription Surveillance (PS) for detection of some clusters of emerging infectious febrile disease with respiratory symptom including unknown febrile disease with respiratory symptoms [3, 4] as syndromic surveillance.