In December 2021, Kyrgyzstan began a project to leverage its high-quality surveillance system for severe acute respiratory infections (SARI) to assess the vaccine effectiveness of COVID-19 and influenza vaccines.
From early in the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO advised countries to use hospital-based sentinel surveillance systems originally established for influenza to also monitor SARS-CoV-2. These platforms can also be adapted to monitor the ongoing effectiveness of COVID-19 and influenza vaccines in preventing infections requiring hospitalization among SARI patients. Continually assessing vaccine effectiveness is particularly important given the increased risks posed by emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and the uncertainties about how long vaccine protection lasts, among other things. This can also strengthen routine monitoring of influenza vaccine effectiveness.
For almost a decade, Kyrgyzstan has worked to improve sentinel surveillance of Influenza-like illness (ILI) and SARI to inform policy decisions related to influenza control in the country. This work has been supported by the PIP Framework Partnership Contribution and Kyrgyzstan has shown remarkable progress in ensuring representative and high-quality sentinel influenza surveillance data. Soon after the COVID-19 pandemic began, Kyrgyzstan integrated COVID-19 monitoring into its sentinel influenza surveillance system, as recommended by WHO, and so has secured the continued monitoring of trends in circulation, virus characteristics and severity of disease. Now the country has also adapted its epidemiological and laboratory SARI surveillance to enable periodic assessment of the effectiveness of COVID-19 and influenza vaccines.
The results of the vaccine effectiveness monitoring will aid programmatic decisions about COVID-19 and influenza vaccination strategies in Kyrgyzstan. They will also contribute to a pooled data analysis overseen by WHO that integrates data from SARI sites across multiple countries.
Kyrgyzstan’s success story is based on harnessing an existing SARI sentinel surveillance system that was strengthened under the PIP Framework Partnership Contribution. The capacity building efforts undertaken over the past seven years to improve the quality and completeness of sentinel surveillance data are showing their value. The enhanced SARI surveillance system provides an effective framework for vaccine effectiveness estimates and provides essential input to policy decisions related to influenza and now also COVID-19 disease control in Kyrgyzstan. As such, the SARI surveillance systems and the vaccine effectiveness monitoring provide a cornerstone in the COVID-19 response and in the preparedness for future seasonal and pandemic influenza.