As an illustration, during the pandemic, patients have been found to have delayed presentations to hospital for several non-COVID urgent illnesses (e.g., stroke, acute coronary syndrome, intoxications, etc.), often due to patients’ perception to strictly adhere to public health interventions and/or fearing risk of contracting COVID-19 in hospitals. The pandemic may be contributing to substantial negative consequences for patients along with indirect and unintended harm reduction (e.g., reduced exposure to low-value healthcare). This shift in prioritization of the health system may have unintentional and underappreciated effects on patients without COVID, including altered access to health services and/or altered models of care. This has been further compounded by successive waves of surging case counts with incomplete opportunity for health systems recovery in between.

The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to widespread disruption to the delivery of non-urgent healthcare services (e.g., scheduled surgical and elective procedure postponements/cancellations, delayed and missed cancer screening) to create health system capacity and prioritize acute care access for patients with COVID-19. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), has spread globally to over 180 countries on 6 continents with over 500 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide, and over 6 million deaths. Since this is a systematic review, all articles for which data were searched for are publicly available on search databases.įunding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.Ĭompeting interests: NO authors have competing interests. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files. Received: DecemAccepted: Published: June 24, 2022Ĭopyright: © 2022 Lau et al. PLoS ONE 17(6):Įditor: Rizaldy Taslim Pinzon, Duta Wacana Christian University School of Medicine / Bethesda Hospital, INDONESIA (2022) Non- COVID outcomes associated with the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic effects study (COPES): A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Citation: Lau VI, Dhanoa S, Cheema H, Lewis K, Geeraert P, Lu D, et al.

Pandemic by J.F. Bone