Is Emergency Surgery Back to Pre-Covid-19 Era? Our Cohort Study

Introduction: The aim of this study is to analyze the progress of hospitalizations and how the emergency operations in our Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences of the Foggia Hospital have changed qualitatively and quantitatively from pre-Covid-19 to today. Methods: Our cohort-study was conducted by analyzing four groups of patients admitted in emergency to our department from 2019 to 2022. Results: We observed a total of 150 patients for the group 1, 25 patients for the group 2, 71 patients for the group 3 and 110 for the group 4, of these 20 were emergency admission during 2019, 16 during 2020, 31 during 2021 and 10 during 2020 (p 0.05); 130 were elective admission during 2019, 9 during 2020, 40 during 2021 and 100 during 2022 (p 0.05). Of the emergency admissions 11 were operated during the no covid period in 2019, 14 during 2020, 29 during 2021, 6 during 2022. Conclusions: The contraction of hospitalizations for urgent and emergency conditions during the first lockdown has been accompanied by positive implications. The measures employed in hospitals to contain the infection determined a reduction in COVID cases, allowing the nearly complete resumption of the surgical activity provided in the pre-COVID era.