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While the total volume of surgical procedures in the US plummeted by nearly half during the first wave of COVID-19 amid recommendations to cancel elective procedures, the rates rebounded to levels previously seen in 2019 by the fall and winter of 2020 — despite the infection burden surging to peak levels during that period, new research shows.
"These findings suggest that health systems learned to adapt and were able to self-regulate, maintaining surgical procedure volume during the largest peak in volume of patients with COVID-19," report the authors of the study, published this week in JAMA Network Open.
The findings are from an assessment of claims data from the Change Healthcare network. The data included a total of 13,108,567 surgical procedures in 11 major procedure categories performed in 49 US states between January 1, 2019, and January 30, 2021.
In the period of the initial shutdown beginning in March 2020 and weeks afterwards, in which the American College of Surgeons (ACS), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and others recommended postponement or cancellation of elective surgical procedures as the pandemic reached the US, the total number of surgical procedures decreased by 48%, from 905,444 procedures during the same period in 2019 to just 458,469 procedures in 2020.
