The COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed national health care systems, not least in the context of hepatitis elimination. This study investigates the effects of the pandemic response on the incidence rate, mortality rate, and case fatality rate (CFR) for hepatitis C virus (HCV) cases in China. We extracted the number of hepatitis C cases and HCV-related deaths by month and year for 2015 to 2021 in China and applied two proportional tests to analyze changes in the average yearly incidence rates, mortality rates, and CFRs for 2015 to 2020. We used the autoregressive integrated moving average model to predict these three rates for 2020 based on 2015 to 2019 HCV data. The incidence of hepatitis C decreased by 7.11% and 1.42% (P < .001) in 2020 and 2021, respectively, compared with 2015 to 2019, while it increased by 6.13% (P < .001) in 2021 relative to 2020. The monthly observed incidence in 2020 was significantly lower (-26.07%) than predicted. Meanwhile, no differences in mortality rate or CFR were observed between 2021, 2020, and 2015 to 2019. Our findings suggest that nonpharmaceutical interventions and behavioral changes to mitigate COVID-19 could have reduced hepatitis C incidence and accelerated China's implementation of a plan to eliminate HCV infection.
Keywords: COVID-19; HCV-elimination program; hepatitis C; incidence; mortality; nonpharmaceutical interventions.