Impacts of COVID-19 on essential health services in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia: A pre-post study

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 has proved to have an indirect impact on essential health services in several parts of the world which could lead to increased morbidity and mortality and loss of the gains made in the past decades. There were no synthesized scientific evidences which could show the impact of COVID-19 epidemics/pandemic on essential health services in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the impacts of COVID-19 epidemics/pandemic on essential health services provision in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia. METHODS: A pre-post study design was used to assess the impacts of COVID-19 on essential health services delivery in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia in the second quarter of 2020 (Post COVID-19) compared to similar quarter in 2019 (Pre COVID-19). The study focuses on five categories; namely; maternal, neonatal and child health care; communicable diseases with a focus on HIV and TB-HIV co-infection; prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV; basic emergency, outpatient, inpatient and blood bank services, non-communicable diseases and road traffic accidents (RTAs). Analysis was done using Stata version 14.0 software package. The effects of COVID-19 epidemics/pandemic were calculated taking the differences between post COVID -19 and pre COVID-19 periods and the levels of service disruptions presented using proportions. Wilcoxon sign rank test was done and a significance level of ≤0.05 was considered as having significant difference among the two quarters. RESULTS: There were significant increase in institutional delivery, delivery by Caesarian Section (CS), still birth, postnatal care within 7 days of delivery, the number of children who received all vaccine doses before 1st birthday, the number of under 5 children screened and had moderate acute malnutrition, the number of under 5 children screened and had severe acute malnutrition and children with SAM admitted for management. However, there were significant decrease in HIV testing and detection along with enrolment to antiretroviral therapy (ART) care, number of patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk ≥ 30% received treatment, RTAs, total units of blood received from national blood transfusion service (NBTS) and regional blood banks, total number of units of blood transfused and emergency referral. There were no significant changes in outpatient visits and admissions. CONCLUSION: Despite commendable achievements in maintaining several of the essential health services, COVID-19 has led to an increase in under nutrition in under five children, decline in HIV detection and care, CVD, cervical cancer screening and blood bank services. Therefore, governments, local and international agencies need to introduce innovative ways to rapidly expand and deliver services in the context of COVID-19. Moreover, lower income countries have to customize comprehensive and coordinated community-based health care approaches, including outreach and campaigns. In addition, countries should ensure that NCDs are incorporated in their national COVID-19 response plans to provide essential health care services to people living with NCDs and HIV or HIV-TB co-infection during the COVID-19 pandemic period.