Tuberculosis under the Influence of COVID-19 Lockdowns: Lessons from Tehran, Iran

Abstract

This study investigates the short-term effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic lockdown on tracing and detection of tuberculosis (TB) patients in Tehran, Iran. Results of this study have demonstrated that due to the significant decrease in the identification of patients with suspected TB during the COVID-19 outbreak in Tehran, it is imperative that patients with suspected TB be tracked and diagnosed more quickly to make up for some of the decline in TB diagnosis in recent months and to recover lost cases.

Operational Research to Assess the Real-Time Impact of COVID-19 on TB and HIV Services: The Experience and Response from Health Facilities in Harare, Zimbabwe

“…With respect to TB program activities, the numbers of people presenting to health facilities with presumptive PTB declined considerably over the 12-month COVID-19 period. These findings were similar to those described in the early months of COVID-19 in clinics in Tehran, Iran [ 28 ] and Nigeria [ 29 ], where lockdown restrictions, transportation difficulties and community fear of health facilities were thought to hinder health facility access. There was a corresponding decline in numbers diagnosed and registered with TB, in line with reports from other countries where the decreases in TB case notifications in the early months of COVID-19 compared with previous years were 48% in clinics in China [ 30 ], 48% in clinics in Brazil [ 31 ] and 56% in India [ 32 ].…”

Assessing the Impact of COVID-19 on TB and HIV Programme Services in Selected Health Facilities in Lilongwe, Malawi: Operational Research in Real Time

“…A large decline in children being admitted to and diagnosed with TB in two hospitals in Johannesburg, South Africa, during COVID-19 would support this hypothesis [28]. The decline in persons presenting with presumptive PTB was similar to what was observed in the early months of COVID-19 in clinics in Tehran, Iran [29], and Nigeria [30], where transportation difficulties, as well as community fear of health facilities, were thought to hinder health facility access.…”

Impact of COVID-19 on the cascade of care for tuberculosis: A systematic review

“…The study designs of the included studies were as follows; one study was described as a surveillance report [45], 12 studies were longitudinal before and after time series [15,24,[30][31][32][34][35][36][37][38][39][40], 12 were cohort studies [17,[20][21][22][27][28][29]33,[41][42][43] and the remaining three were cross-sectional studies [23,25,44]. Ten studies [17,25,26,29,31,32,34,36,37,39] had nationally representative data while others were provincial, and community based.…”

“…For item 2, the sampling frame in 22 of the 27 studies [15,17,[21][22][23][25][26][27][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][39][40][41][42][43] closely represented the target population. For item 3, only 5 out of the 27 studies [17,31,32,36,37] randomly selected their samples.…”