Miss Jacqueline Rusnak1, Mr Karan Varshney1,2
1School of Medicine, Deakin University Waurn Ponds, Australia
2School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the operation of health services globally by creating barriers to care. For tuberculosis (TB), an infectious disease that requires a timely diagnosis, barriers to accessing health services can delay diagnoses and have highly detrimental impacts on patient outcomes. There is hence an urgent need to investigate the extent to which TB reporting has been impacted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods: After acquiring data from the USAID TB Hub on TB priority countries which reported cases of TB in 2020 and 2021, average changes in reporting rates were determined for each respective year. Means were compared using a paired t-test to determine the extent of the difference in TB reporting.
Results: TB reporting data from the years 2020 and 2021 were available for 13 TB priority countries. For these countries, TB case reporting consistently increased annually prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, TB reporting declined by an average of 12.73% (Range: -37.30% to 15.74%). In 2021, there was a mean decline of 73.02% (Range: -96.03% to -58.64%). The average rates of TB reporting in 2021 declined by 60.29% more than they declined in 2020 (95% CI: -71.59 to -48.99), and this difference was statistically significant (p<0.0001).
Conclusion: Given this trend of the underreporting of TB since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is crucial for health services to prioritize diagnosing and managing TB. For this to happen, there must be adequate support and funding for these services to operate in an acceptable capacity.
Biography: Ms. Rusnak is currently a medical student at Deakin University. She has previously completed a Bachelor’s in Biomedicine, with Honours, at Monash University. Her research interests lie in the sphere of leukemia, infectious disease, and epidemiology.