We developed a new activity level setting threshold method, the mean standard deviation (MSD) method to quantify COVID-19 activity levels. This has been validated against the moving epidemic method (MEM), which has been used for influenza for many years, and we observed very similar results. The MSD method can prove to be a tool to use for respiratory viruses with limited historical data or seasonality to quantify activity levels when other respiratory viruses are also circulating.
Keywords: COVID-19; epidemiology; influenza; thresholds.