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The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.11.20061697 doi: medRxiv preprint 8 Next, we calculated the probabilities of the numbers of patients prescribed a certain type of drug in PS comparison to the number predicted by the model. The probability of aberration for the drug was defined as one minus the probabilities of the numbers of patients prescribed a certain type of drug in PS compared with the number predicted by the model. The probability of a cluster with emerging diseases is the product of the probability of aberration in drugs corresponding to symptoms of the emerging diseases. For example, for COVID-19, because we presume that its typical symptoms are high fever and respiratory symptoms, we can presume that the probability of clusters with unknown febrile disease with respiratory symptoms is the product of the probabilities of aberrations in AP and MIC. This analysis, conducted prospectively in 2020, uses data from October 1, 2010 through 2019 by prefecture and by age class. Age classes were defined as 14 and younger, 15-65, and 65 years and older. We adopted 97.5% as the tentative criterion to detect clusters, which corresponds to a significance level of 5%.