Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

9 INFECTION CONTROL The new era of COVID-19 surveillance By Mackenzie Bean A lternate data sources — such as wastewater surveillance and population surveys — are emerging as the most effective ways to track local COVID-19 virus trends amid unreliable case data and a departure from daily reporting cadences, Betsy Ladyzhets wrote in an Oct. 17 piece for e Atlantic. Many states have sunsetted their COVID-19 case reporting, and the CDC has scaled back to updating metrics on a weekly basis. e rise of at-home testing also means case numbers are just "the tip of the iceberg," according to Denis Nash, PhD, an epidemiologist at the City University of New York in New York City. "We're heading into a period where it's going to be increasingly harder to know what's going on with the virus," he told e Atlantic. To understand how the virus is spreading, many experts are now relying on wastewater surveillance, which can be more consistent than case counts. Newsha Ghaeli, president and a co-founder of wastewater- surveillance company Biobot Analytics, said it is best to watch how virus levels in wastewater change over time. People should consider whether levels are rising or falling and how these levels compare to earlier periods of the pandemic. Although long-term wastewater data can help detect upcoming surges, researchers are still studying how the data corresponds to actual infection levels, as waste patterns can vary according to geography and environmental factors. Some experts are also conducting population surveys to capture data from people who may have tested positive for the virus but never interacted with the healthcare system. ese surveys can pinpoint the discrepancies between case counts and true infections to help researchers estimate the virus's actual spread. n App can detect COVID-19 in someone's voice, research shows By Mackenzie Bean R esearchers have developed a mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to identify people with COVID-19 infections based on the sound of their voices. A team led by researchers at Maastricht University's Institute of Data Science in the Netherlands developed the app, which asks users to input basic information about their medical history and record themselves breathing, coughing and speaking, according to a Sept. 4 release from the European Lung Foundation. Researchers tested the AI model using 893 audio samples from people with and without COVID-19 and found it had an 89 percent accuracy rate. Although the results need to be validated with larger numbers, researchers said the app could serve as a cheaper, easy-to-use alternative to polymerase chain reaction testing in low-income countries. Researchers shared their findings Sept. 5 at the European Respiratory Society International Congress in Barcelona, Spain. n Public health failures spurred RSV surge, nurses say By Mackenzie Bean T he notion that rising cases of respiratory syncytial virus are due to children's lack of exposure amid masking and stay-at- home orders is "flawed conjecture that is not based on science," National Nurses United said Nov. 14. Instead, NNU contends that the uptick in virus activity is due to a "complete abandonment" of public health measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses. e nation's largest nurses union said there is no evidence that an "immunity debt" is causing the jump in RSV cases and cited CDC data showing that positivity rates for RSV were actually higher in late summer and fall 2021 compared to the same period this year. "Promoting the idea of 'immunity debt' is not only unscientific, it is harmful to the public's health," NNU President Deborah Burger, RN, said in a news release. NNU has been advocating for heightened infection control efforts since the start of the pandemic to protect nurses and the public. "We know that we are not safe until everyone is safe," Ms. Burger said. "We continue to fight for the strongest protections for healthcare and other front-line workers. We need the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to issue a permanent Covid standard to protect nurses and other healthcare workers." n

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