Accepted for/Published in: Interactive Journal of Medical Research
Date Submitted: Sep 5, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 8, 2022 - Jul 22, 2022
Date Accepted: Jan 31, 2023
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jan 31, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Impact of COVID-19 on road trauma in Vietnam: a positive side of the pandemic.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Road trauma remains a significant contributor to mortality in Vietnam despite significant improvement in the last decade. The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated public health measures such as social distancing and lockdowns, which had an unforeseen benefit on road trauma in high income countries. This article aims to investigate if those reductions were also seen in Vietnam, a low to middle income country.
Objective:
Our aims to investigate how COVID-19 pandemic happen in Vietnam, the government policies again this deadly disease and it effect on road trauma fatalities
Methods:
We used published data from the Vietnamese Ministry of Health (MoH) for COVID-19 data and the Vietnamese General Statistic Office (GSO), traffic police department for the last 15 years (from 2007 to 2021) for road traffic mortality. Poisson regression modelling was used to estimate trends in annual national road fatality rates for the period 2007–2021. The actual road traffic mortality in 2021 was compared with projected figures to demonstrate the effect of COVID-19 on road trauma deaths.
Results:
Between 2007 and 2020 the number of annual road traffic deaths had more than halved from 15.3 to 7.0 per 100,000, an average reduction of 5.4% per annum. We estimated that this reduction would increase to 12.1% (95% CI 8.9%, 15.3%) in 2021 if current trends persisted. The actual number of road trauma deaths fell by 16.4%. On a monthly scale, this reduction was largely seen from August to October when lockdown and social distancing was in force. It can reasonably be concluded that government policies to address the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an additional 4.3% decrease of road traffic deaths in 2021.
Conclusions:
In 2021the road traffic death reduction in Vietnam was 3 time greater than the trend over the preceding 14 years. The public heath response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam was associated with a third of this reduction. This has been observed in High-Income Countries but was demonstrated by us for the first time in a Low- and Middle-Income Country.
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