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BACKGROUND: COVID-19 changed the epidemiology of community-acquired respiratory viruses. We explored patterns of respiratory viral testing to understand which tests are most clinically useful in the postpandemic era. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective observational study of discharge data from PINC-AI (formerly Premier), a large administrative database. Use of multiplex nucleic acid amplification respiratory panels in acute care, including small (2-5 targets), medium (6-11), and large panels (>11), were compared between the early pandemic (03/2020-10/2020), late pandemic (11/2020-4/2021), and prepandemic respiratory season (11/2019 - 02/2020) using ANOVA. RESULTS: < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: Postpandemic, clinical use of respiratory panel testing shifted from predominantly large panels to predominantly small panels. Factors driving this change may include resource availability, costs, and the clinical utility of targeting important pathogenic viruses instead of testing "for everything."
Baghdadi et al. (Thu,) studied this question.