RESP-NET: Monitoring COVID-19, RSV, & Influenza Hospitalizations

Influenza, RSV, and COVID-19 are very common pathogens. From a public health perspective, we care about them because of their ability to cause severe disease. RespNet is a surveillance system that helps us understand that severe disease, who's at risk for it, and what are their outcomes. At a high level, RespNet is set up to conduct population-based surveillance, or monitoring of influenza, RSV, and COVID-related hospitalizations on a population level. We try to capture every case within a population so you can actually describe who is being impacted in a more representative way. So you can calculate the rate of disease within, say, the population of a county, the population of a state, and that is much more representative than a single clinic or a single academic institution in terms of understanding the epidemiology or the spread of a disease in the population. And it's set up to be longitudinal. So it starts, say, in 2003, but we keep it going so you can compare over years what is different in 2003 compared to 2004 compared to 2024 in whatever pathogen you're looking at. RespNet is absolutely critical for us to maintain the level of medical care that is needed each viral season. Without RespNet, we would be totally taken by surprise each season, and it would be even worse in a pandemic without the critical infrastructure that RespNet provides. So Colorado has benefited from RespNet in that we have really robust and rich data from our five-county Denver metro catchment area. And while we may only have that data in that catchment area, I think it's really applicable to the rest of the state. So I think we've been able to share information not only about, you know, who's being hospitalized and what those hospitalizations look like, but also some of the research and projects that have come out of RespNet, FluServNet specifically, about, you know, who's more affected by hospital influenza and who's more likely to be hospitalized. And in Colorado, that isn't so much based on your location. It's really throughout the state we've been able to generalize that information. In early 2021, we met with our RespNet colleagues at CDC, and they alerted us to an alarming trend in the data. We were seeing disproportionate hospitalization rates in our Black and African-American communities. When we looked at our Oregon data, we saw those same trends. We used that information to reach out to our Black and African-American community leaders, and we worked with them on a targeted vaccine outreach campaign that was incredibly successful. Ultimately, we were able to vaccinate over 98 percent of that community, the highest rate reported by any state that reports those data. The additional clinical detail that we capture in our surveillance, our hospital-based surveillance, allows for understanding both of treatment and vaccine effectiveness, which informs policy and public acceptance of these treatments and vaccines, as well as the ability to understand risk factors and be able to present, again, to policymakers and the public, the risk of severe disease. We don't collect data just to keep the data and to study it. It's really to inform practice, both in healthcare and in the public. And these efforts to get our data out have really accelerated our ability to do that. What is so fulfilling about ResNet is doing the work to understand the epidemiology of these viruses, and coming up with the data that can inform methods to prevent the disease caused by these viruses, and being able to assess the impact of those methods of prevention and control. And you feel like you really are getting data for public health action. You're saving lives. You are impacting people's health.