There are limited studies describing the impact of lifting COVID-19 lockdown restrictions on traumatic injuries. It is anticipated that injury cases would rebound towards pre-lockdown levels because people will travel more and practice sports after lockdowns end. The patterns and outcome of injuries after easing lockdown restrictions in the Middle East, and specifically in Saudi Arabia, are unknown.
Although the focus of this study is comparing one year of injury data before and after easing of the lockdown restrictions, our data was extracted continuously from March 2019 to June 2021, including a three-month lockdown period. Therefore, injury data during the lockdown phase were included in this study as phase 2 .Statistical analyses were performed using the R program for statistical computing, version R-4.1.1.
Table 1 Demographic and presentation characteristics of traumatic injury patients of pre-restrictions, restrictions/lockdown, and after easing the restrictionsComparing period 1 and period 3 , there was a reduction in the total number of trauma cases by 5.2% post easing of restrictions. There were also changes in the distribution of cases by age group; we observed a reduction of 1.7% with respect to the proportion of trauma cases in the age group of < 14 years vs 188 ,< 0.