Assessing the Collateral Damage of the Novel Coronavirus: A Call to Action for the Post-COVID-19 Era

As of April 20th, 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by SARSCoV-2, has killed over 170,000 people worldwide and mortality projections for the United States have been as high as 200,000. Health systems have been pressed with an uncomfortable reality to rapidly adapt to the growing burden of COVID-19 patients requiring critical care. This comes at the expense of elective surgeries, which are increasingly being cancelled across the world. This paper explores the contemporary issues impacting healthcare resources during the pandemic and makes recommendations for identifying an appropriate balance of their use to optimize patient care.