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Little detailed sociodemographic information is available about how alcohol use and associated health care visits have changed during COVID-19. Therefore, we assessed how rates of emergency department (ED) visits due to alcohol have changed during COVID-19 by age and sex and for individuals living in urban and rural settings and low and high-income neighborhoods.

Our cohort included 13,660,516 unique Ontario residents between the ages of 10−105. We compared rates and characteristics of ED visits due to alcohol, identified using ICD-10 codes, from March 11-August 31 2020 to the same period in the prior 3 years. We used negative binomial regressions to examine to examine changes is visits during COVID-19 after accounting for temporal and seasonal trends.

During COVID-19, the average monthly rate of ED visits due to alcohol decreased by 17.2 % (95 % CI -22.7, -11 …