Infant Pneumococcal Carriage in Belgium Not Affected by COVID-19 Containment Measures.

Laura Willen,Esra Ekinci,Stefanie Desmet,Lize Cuypers,Heidi Theeten

doi:10.3389/fcimb.2021.825427

Laura Willen, Esra Ekinci + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fcimb.2021.825427

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Abstract

Streptococcus pneumoniae is an important and frequently carried respiratory pathogen that has the potential to cause serious invasive diseases, such as pneumonia, meningitis, and sepsis. Young children and older adults are among the most vulnerable to developing serious disease. With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and the concomitant restrictive measures, invasive disease cases caused by respiratory bacterial species, including pneumococci, decreased substantially. Notably, the stringency of the containment measures as well as the visible reduction in the movement of people appeared to coincide with the drop in invasive disease cases. One could argue that wearing protective masks and adhering to social distancing guidelines to halt the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, also led to a reduction in the person-to-person transmission of respiratory bacterial species. Although plausible, this conjecture is challenged by novel data obtained from our nasopharyngeal carriage study which is performed yearly in healthy daycare center attending children. A sustained and high pneumococcal carriage rate was observed amid periods of stringent restrictive measures. This finding prompts us to revisit the connection between nasopharyngeal colonization and invasion and invites us to look closer at the nasopharyngeal microbiome as a whole.

Highlights

Streptococcus pneumoniae is part of the commensal flora of the upper respiratory tract and colonizes, together with several other bacterial species, the nasopharyngeal niche
Young children are known to frequently possess pneumococci, even more so when attending daycare centers, and especially so during the drier and colder months when its spread is more likely to coincide with respiratory viral infections (Numminen et al, 2015)
Analogous to the observations made by Invasive Respiratory Infection Surveillance (IRIS), this second period of restrictive measures in Belgium – corresponding to the winter of the epidemiologic year 20202021 – was characterized by a reduction in invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) cases of 42% in young Belgian children when compared to previous non-COVID epidemiologic years (2017-2019)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Streptococcus pneumoniae is part of the commensal flora of the upper respiratory tract and colonizes, together with several other bacterial species, the nasopharyngeal niche. SARS-CoV-2 co-infections could have impacted pneumococcal carriage rates (Howard, 2021); FIGURE 1 | Streptococcus pneumoniae carriage rates and invasive pneumococcal disease cases in young children (aged

CONCLUSION

Findings

ETHICS STATEMENT