Trends in deaths from road injuries during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan, January to September 2020
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Trends in deaths from road injuries during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan, January to September 2020 Shuhei Nomura1,2*† , Takayuki Kawashima3†, Daisuke Yoneoka4†, Yuta Tanoue5†, Akifumi Eguchi6†, Stuart Gilmour4 and Masahiro Hashizume2
Abstract Background: In Japan, the latest estimates of excess all-cause deaths through January to July 2020 showed that the overall (direct and indirect) mortality burden from the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Japan was relatively low compared to Europe and the United States. However, consistency between the reported number of COVID-19 deaths and excess all-cause deaths was limited across prefectures, suggesting the necessity of distinguishing the direct and indirect consequences of COVID-19 by cause-specific analysis. To examine whether deaths from road injuries decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan, consistent with a possible reduction of road transport activity connected to Japan’s state of emergency declaration, we estimated the exiguous deaths from road injuries in each week from January to September 2020 by 47 prefectures. Methods: To estimate the expected weekly number of deaths from road injuries, a quasi-Poisson regression was applied to daily traffic fatalities data obtained from Traffic Accident Research and Data Analysis, Japan. We set two thresholds, point estimate and lower bound of the two-sided 95% prediction interval, for exiguous deaths, and report the range of differences between the observed number of deaths and each of these thresholds as exiguous deaths. Results: Since January 2020, in a few weeks the observed deaths from road injuries fell below the 95% lower bound, such as April 6–12 (exiguous deaths 5–21, percent deficit 2.82–38.14), May 4–10 (8–23, 21.05–43.01), July 20– 26 (12–29, 30.77–51.53), and August 3–9 (3–20, 7.32–34.41). However, those less than the 95% lower bound were also observed in weeks in the previous years. (Continued on next page)
* Correspondence: [email protected] † Shuhei Nomura, Takayuki Kawashima, Daisuke Yoneoka, Yuta Tanoue, and Akifumi Eguchi are shared co-first authorship. 1 Department of Health Policy and Management, School of Medicine, Keio University, 35 Shinanomachi, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160-8582, Japan 2 Department of Global Health Policy, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons
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