@article{ref1,
title="Trends in deaths from road injuries during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan, January  to September 2020",
journal="Injury epidemiology",
year="2020",
author="Nomura, Shuhei and Kawashima, Takayuki and Yoneoka, Daisuke and Tanoue, Yuta and Eguchi, Akifumi and Gilmour, Stuart and Hashizume, Masahiro",
volume="7",
number="1",
pages="e66-e66",
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. <br><br>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. <br><br>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. <br><br>CONCLUSIONS:  The number of road traffic fatalities during the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan has  decreased slightly, but not significantly, in several weeks compared with the  average year. This suggests that the relatively small changes in excess all-cause  mortality observed in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic could not be explained  simply by an offsetting reduction in traffic deaths. Considering a variety of other  indirect effects, evaluating an independent, unbiased measure of COVID-19-related  mortality burden could provide insight into the design of future broad-based  infectious disease counter-measures and offer lessons to other countries.    Keywords: CoViD-19-Road-Traffic<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="2197-1714",
doi="10.1186/s40621-020-00294-7",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40621-020-00294-7"
}