Evaluating the impact of COVID-19 outbreak on hepatitis B and forecasting the epidemiological trend in mainland China: a causal analysis

It is uncertain how COVID-19 outbreak influences the hepatitis B epidemics. This study aims to evaluate the effects on hepatitis B owing to the COVID-19 outbreak and forecast the hepatitis B epidemiological trend in mainland China to speed up the course of the “End viral hepatitis Strategy”. We estimated the causal impacts and created a forecast through adopting monthly notifications of hepatitis B each year from 2005 to 2020 in mainland China using the Bayesian structural time series (BSTS) method. The hepatitis B epidemics fluctuates irregularly during the period 2005–2007(APC = 8.7, P = 0.246) and 2015–2020(APC = 1.7, P = 0.290), and there is a downturn (APC=-3.2, 95