Introduction
Acute respiratory infections
(ARIs) tend to occur in childhood
and seriously affect their health[1], as over 80% of respiratory
tract infections in children result from viruses[2], particularly
common ones include: adenovirus (ADV), respiratory syncytial virus
(RSV), influenza virus (Flu) types A and B, and parainfluenza
virus (PIV) type 1, 2, and 3 [3–5]. Respiratory viruses were shown
to have their own epidemic characteristics and are easily affected by
environmental, climate, and human flow factors[6,7]. To confront
epidemic respiratory viruses, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)
are frequently the first line of defense used for delaying and
moderating their spread in the population [8].
When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic on January 2020, a set of public
health preventive NPIs measures was adopted to control the disease
transmission, including social withdrawal, closing schools, wearing
masks, travel restrictions, personal hygiene improvements, and closing
borders in China which eventually led to a significant decrease in other
common respiratory virus circulation in nearly the entire temperate
zone[9,10]. For investigating the COVID-19 effect and correlated
preventive measures on common respiratory virus epidemiology, especially
RSV, the viral pathogen epidemiological features were retrospectively
analyzed in clinical samples obtained from ARIs children in East China
from January 2018 to December 2019 and compared to those from January
2020 to December 2022, aiming to develop the preventive measures for
viral infections in children.