Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has put an enormous burden on healthcare systems. As a direct consequence, many elective procedures were cancelled and available resources were relocated to emergencies and COVID-19 patients. We aimed to analyze the impact on orthopedic surgery in Romania. We performed a retrospective analysis of orthopedics and trauma cases admitted over the first six months of 2019 and 2020 in three representative clinics. In total, there were 1900 patients: 1241 from Timisoara, 216 from Cluj-Napoca, and 443 from Bucharest. In April, activity for all cases in the regional trauma center dropped to 23.8% and stopped in the other two. No arthroscopies or elective joint replacements were performed in April. By June, hospital admissions resumed for trauma cases while arthroscopies and joint replacements still lagged behind.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic had an unprecedented impact on our lives
Many elective procedures were cancelled and all available resources were relocated to emergencies and COVID-19 patients [1,2,3]
Hospital admissions dropped more than half in March
Summary
The COVID-19 (corona virus 2019) pandemic had an unprecedented impact on our lives. Starting at the beginning of 2020, the entire world was forced to quickly adjust to using personal protective equipment (PPE) and physical distancing [1]. The orthopedic specialty was one of the most seriously hit due to the large number of postponable elective procedures and major surgeries with high resource requirements. Joint replacements in particular were stopped and orthopedic departments were converted toCOVID-19 facilities [1,2,3,4,5]. While this process followed similar guidelines, it had significant regional variability [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
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