Last year, the coronavirus pandemic forced us to make a host of adjustments to our regular behaviors. But these abruptly adopted lifestyle changes may have also contributed to something unexpected: the largest single-year decrease in reported cases of foodborne illness in decades, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published Thursday.

The new research, published in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, was based on preliminary data from 2020 and issued by the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet), which monitors laboratory-diagnosed infections caused by eight pathogens regularly transmitted through food. These include E. coli and Salmonella. Cases of infection were reported to FoodNet personnel by clinical laboratories in 10 states, covering roughly 15 percent of the United States’ population.

In 2020, the frequency with which people reported a case of foodborne illness declined a whopping 26 percent.
When not in the midst of a global public-health crisis, roughly 48 million Americans get sick from a foodborne illness, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die every year, according to CDC estimates. But the FoodNet data show that in 2020, the frequency with which people reported a case of foodborne illness declined a whopping 26 percent, from an average annual incidence of 50 cases per 100,000 during 2017 to 2019, to 37 cases per 100,000 in 2020. (FoodNet makes the comparison to the previous three years to better show the direction of trends.) The monitoring system also reported that last year there were 18,462 reported cases of infection overall, 4,788 hospitalizations and 118 deaths.

Read the full article about the effects of COVID sanitation measures by Matthew Sedacca at The Counter.