[Introduction of Respiratory Infectious Disease Sentinel Surveillance Systems and Assessment Results]

The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency operates a sentinel surveillance system for major respiratory infections such as influenza, a class 4 infectious disease, in accordance with the Infectious Disease Prevention and Control Act (hereinafter referred to as the Infectious Disease Prevention Act). Accordingly, to systematically evaluate the performance, quality of data, and usefulness of the respiratory infectious disease sentinel surveillance system and seek future development directions, a research service was provided to evaluate the adequacy of the operation of the respiratory infectious disease sentinel surveillance system from August 2023 to February 2024. In order to evaluate the sensitivity of the surveillance system, the correlation coefficient was high in the Pearson's correlation analysis between the number of reported cases of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus among the sentinel surveillance data and the number of claims for the corresponding diseases (excluding duplicates) from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service, indicating excellent sensitivity. In addition, the representativeness was examined through a correlation analysis between the number of sentinel surveillance medical institutions by administrative district and the number of appropriate surveillance institutions according to the population ratio and the current number of surveillance institutions, and this was also evaluated as having excellent representativeness due to a high correlation coefficient. Based on this, considering that various respiratory infectious diseases will occur regularly in the future, it is necessary to continuously improve and strengthen the respiratory infectious disease sentinel surveillance system, such as by expanding the number of sentinel surveillance institutions.