Did food poisoning cases drop during the pandemic's first year?

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, many parts of daily life changed. A public health surveillance network that tracks foodborne illnesses in 10 U.S. sites noticed something: reports of infections from common foodborne germs went down compared to the average from 2017 to 2019. This is an observation from a public health tracking system, not a controlled experiment. It tells us there was an association between the pandemic period and fewer reported illnesses, but it doesn't tell us the size of the drop, the exact numbers, or what caused it. The data comes from specific monitoring sites and can't be generalized to the whole country. It also can't prove that pandemic changes directly caused the decrease—only that the two events happened around the same time. More detailed analysis would be needed to understand the 'why' behind this pattern.