Three Patients with COVID-19 and Pulmonary Tuberculosis, Wuhan, China, January–February 2020

Abstract

We acknowledge that our assessment could be limited by the application of retrospective and descriptive methods involving analyses of publicly available surveillance data. It is possible that the temporal relationship between the seasonal influenza pattern and social distancing strategy implementation had occurred coincidentally by chance because heterogeneity of influenza seasons is a well-known phenomenon. Previous research suggested that despite the marked fluctuations of peak amplitudes and peak times, epidemic duration is often conserved (2). However, occurrence of a deformed seasonal pattern in the setting of the outbreak of infection with SARS-CoV-2 served as a natural experiment for supporting the evaluation of the impacts of social distancing in mitigating influenza virus transmission (6,7).