Effect of COVID-19 Lockdown on the “Deliverymen Injuries”

Stamatios Papadakis, A.^*, Georgios Gourtzelidis, Dimitrios Pallis, Konstantinos Tsivelekas, Evangelos Triantafyllou & Charikleia Komari

B’ Department of Orthopaedics, KAT General Hospital of Attica, Greece

Dr. Stamatios Papadakis, A., B’ Department of Orthopaedics, KAT General Hospital of Attica, Greece.

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Lockdown; Orthopaedic Trauma; Deliverymen Injuries

Abstract

COVID-19 emerged as a pandemic in 2020 leading world-wide governments to enforce national lockdowns. Orthopaedic trauma care was not left unaffected. One such special category of trauma patients was deliverymen. This is a retrospective study concerning a total of 17 male patients with mean age of 30.8years (18 - 45 years) who sustained injuries while on service. We compared data from two periods: Period A concerned a time span between March 23rd and May 5th in 2019 and period B included the same timeframe in 2020 during lockdown. Nine patients were treated during the first non-COVID period, while 8 were admitted in the hospital during lockdown. Six of them were treated operatively, while the rest underwent a conservative treatment. The number of surgical cases remained the same between the two periods. COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the enforcement of national lockdowns, which reduced dramatically the number of vehicles moving on the roads. On the other hand, delivering food and goods also rose during that period, leading more motorcyclists to speed on the empty roads, thus maintaining the same rate of injuries in this particular working group as in the pre-lockdown period. The lack of awareness among these workers about the much needed- though expensive-protective gear contributes in the continuation of the deliverymen injuries.

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