Leading Indicators of COVID-19 Disease Burden in Caregivers of Young Children

• In Event: Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Topic - Solicited Content: COVID-19 Related

Abstract

Background: COVID-19 has underscored the importance of obtaining a near-real time understanding of disease burden in the population so as to support timely and coordinated response efforts. Multi-component public health surveillance methods have contributed to this understanding by incorporating a variety of different data sources such as Emergency Department data and ambulance dispatch data to help detect local surges of COVID-19. In particular, a surveillance technique called syndromic surveillance shows promise in being able to provide information that is more suitable for supporting a timely response. Syndromic surveillance data is intended to support the early detection of outbreaks or other events (i.e. early event detection) by identifying leading indicators of disease prevalence in a community. What differentiates syndromic surveillance from traditional surveillance methods is the focus on non-diagnostic criteria such as symptoms or health-seeking behaviors, prior to a diagnosis or case confirmation. This makes syndromic surveillance uniquely suited for flagging novel disease trends, as well as for providing situational awareness about ongoing disease threats. With COVID-19 testing capacity and diagnostic challenges abundant, it is prudent to discover other methods for assessing local disease burden. While syndromic surveillance work often focuses on symptom clusters, literature supports that this method can also be used to evaluate other health seeking and community level behaviors, such as changes in healthcare visits and absenteeism rates (Elliot et al., 2020).
Current Study: The current study aims to assess the impact of COVID-19 on caregivers of young children (aged 0-5). It is hypothesized that with the widespread nature of COVID-19, community level health-seeking or related factors could be leading indicators for surges in COVID-19 cases. This study will use data from a project that has been conducting a national survey of parents (age 18 years or older) with young children since April 2020, and is slated to continue through December 2020. Approximately 1,000 households selected through a stratified sampling methodology to be representative geographically, racially and by income distribution are surveyed weekly. Currently there are 7,324 unique respondents in the subject pool, with approximately 250 added weekly.
Methods & Analytic Plan: To identify potential COVID-19 syndromic surveillance factors, a chi-squared test for independence and correlation analyses will be conducted to assess relationships between absenteeism, health-seeking behaviors, parental stress, and general health symptoms with COVID-19 disease trends. If sample size is sufficient, spatial autocorrelation will be assessed with regression models using ESRI ArcGISPro 10.7.1 and statistical assessments analyzed with SPSS version 26 and RStudio Version 1.2.1335.
Conclusion: Using this data to identify caregiver behaviors (both health-seeking and not), that precede increased disease rates in communities could provide a window of opportunity for a quicker response, which in turn can help provide protective benefits to young children such as early school closures, increased hygiene standards and social distancing methods.

Authors

• Allison Kay Kunerth, University of Oregon
  Presenting Author

• Ashley Bautista, University of Oregon
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sihong Liu, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Philip Andrew Fisher, University of Oregon
  Non-Presenting Author