key: cord-1025393-o82dp0ag
authors: Marín‐Hernández, Daniela; Schwartz, Robert E.; Nixon, Douglas F.
title: Epidemiological evidence for association between higher influenza vaccine uptake in the elderly and lower COVID‐19 deaths in Italy
date: 2020-06-09
journal: J Med Virol
DOI: 10.1002/jmv.26120
sha: 58f4a7ac366340cd726e54d5ebf76ed31106b91b
doc_id: 1025393
cord_uid: o82dp0ag

The Italian COVID-19 epidemic may finally be slowing, although the virus has spread from the North in Lombardy throughout the rest of the country. While there have been more than 233,000 confirmed cases, and a mortality rate estimated around 14%, Italy will now navigate an exit from lockdown with continued testing, monitoring, and contact tracing of any new infections. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Epidemiological evidence for association between higher influenza vaccine uptake in the elderly and lower COVID-19 deaths in Italy

To the Editor,

The Italian COVID-19 epidemic may finally be slowing, although the virus has spread from the North in Lombardy throughout the rest of the country. Although there have been more than 233,000 confirmed cases and a mortality rate estimated around 14%, Italy will now navigate an exit from lockdown with continued testing, monitoring, and contact tracing of any new infections. The higher mortality rate in Italy compared with China has been attributed to a higher prevalence of elderly people living in Italy and a different strain of SARS-CoV-2. 1 However, as the virus has now spread throughout the country, regional differences in mortality rate from COVID-19 have been 4 The MDCK cell line is made available to vaccine manufacturers from cell banks that have produced the cell line in accordance with good manufacturing practice guidelines, and has been tested for purity, identity, and for the absence of contaminating viruses as required by Food and Drug Administration, EMMA, and World Health Organization guidelines. 5 All three forms of the influenza vaccine were available for potential prescription and use.

We used publicly available data to compute a Pearson productmoment correlation for assessment of the relationship between the percentage of vaccinated adults greater than 65 years old 6 and the percentage of COVID-19 deaths from each region in Italy up to 2 May 2020. 7 We calculated a simple linear regression to predict the percentage of COVID-19 deaths based on the percentage of adults greater than 65 years old vaccinated against influenza.

We found a moderate to strong negative correlation (r = −.5874, n = 21, P = .0051), meaning that where there were higher influenza vaccination rates, less deaths from COVID-19 occurred. Then, we 

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