Erschienen in:
16.06.2020 | COVID-19 | Letter to the Editor
Zur Zeit gratis
Where are the hernias? A paradoxical decrease in emergency hernia surgery during COVID-19 pandemic
verfasst von:
D. L. Lima, X. Pereira, D. C. dos Santos, D. Camacho, F. Malcher
Erschienen in:
Hernia
|
Ausgabe 5/2020
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Excerpt
As our hospitals become overwhelmed with the COVID-19 pandemic, our ability to provide timely and safe emergency surgical care has been called into question [
1] In our hospital, located at the Bronx, NY, in which is located in one of the most affected zip codes in the country, our surgical department was largely re-deployed to non-surgical services to help our overburdened medicine colleagues. Nonetheless, our surgeons remained committed to providing adequate emergency surgical care. Surprisingly, we experienced a decrease in the number of patients presenting with emergency surgical ailments, especially those presenting with incarcerated hernias. This paradoxical effect has been described by other authors and largely attributed to the concept of competing risk, patient apprehension, and secondary effects of an overburdened system [
1,
2]. At our institution, the first COVID-19 case was admitted on March 11th, 2020. Elective surgeries completely ceased on March 18th, and the peak number of COVID-19 positive patients diagnosed in a day came on April 14, 2020. The total number of emergency cases at the peak of the epidemic, between March 11th and May 10th, was 209, which represents a 48% reduction in volume when compared to 401 during the same period of 2019. …
