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.