New Study Finds Adults No More Susceptible to Infections than Prior to Pandemic

According to a press release from Epic Research, adults are no more susceptible to common infections and illnesses in 2023 than prior to the pandemic.

The press release says that “To understand whether the rate of disease is higher after the pandemic compared to before, we studied the prevalence of various diseases in 2019 and in 2023 among adult patients aged 18 to 50. The diseases were grouped into three categories for analysis: respiratory diseases (asthma, pneumonia, and COPD), infectious diseases (strep throat, shingles, sepsis, and influenza), and gastrointestinal (GI) tract diseases (gastritis and pancreatitis). Patients were matched 1:1 between 2019 and 2023 based on patient age, sex, race, ethnicity, Social Vulnerability Index quartile, and Rural Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) score.”

Further, “We found that rates of respiratory diseases have decreased. Asthma rates decreased from 7.84% in 2019 to 7.00% in 2023, COPD decreased from 0.44% to 0.32%, and pneumonia decreased from 0.31% to 0.21%, as seen in Figure 1. Among infectious diseases, we saw an increase in the rate of strep throat, going from 0.63% in 2019 to 0.85% in 2023, which aligns with our previous findings.2 The rates of shingles, sepsis, and influenza were mostly unchanged with small decreases in prevalence in 2023 compared to 2019. We found that gastritis rates were higher in 2019 than 2023, going from 0.82% of patients to 0.60% of patients. Meanwhile, pancreatitis remained unchanged.”

Other key findings include:

• Among patients aged 18 to 50, the prevalence of asthma, COPD, pneumonia, shingles, influenza, sepsis, gastritis, and pancreatitis did not increase in 2023 compared to 2019
• Strep throat rates increased from 0.63% of patients in 2019 to 0.85% of patients in 2023
• Asthma rates decreased from 7.84% of patients in 2019 to 7.00% of patients in 2023