Table 1.
Characteristics of the surgeons and centers responding to the survey.
Fig 1.
Low, moderate and high Hospital Bed Stress (A) and Critical Care Bed Stress (B), derived from the COVID-19 Load compared to the hospital and critical care bed capacities respectively. Centers with low hospital or critical care bed capacity and no COVID patients were determined to have a low stress, whereas similarly sized centers caring for <20 patients deemed at moderate stress. Centers with high hospital or critical care bed capacity and greater than 200 COVID patients were determined to have a high stress, whereas similarly sized centers caring for <200 patients deemed at moderate stress.
Fig 2.
Box and whiskers plot of the relationship between national mortality rate from COVID-19 and either Hospital Bed Stress (A) or Critical Care Bed Stress (B). Black circles represent outliers and ‘x’ is a jitter plot of the raw data. p = <0.001 for all comparisons between groups.
Table 2.
The global variation of COVID Load, Hospital Bed Stress and Critical Care Bed Stress.
Table 3.
Change in diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities stratified by Hospital Bed Stress and Critical Care Bed Stress.
Fig 3.
Violin plots of Change Score against Hospital Bed Stress and Critical Care Bed Stress metrics.
The summary boxes denote the mean +/- standard deviation for each group. The groups are statistically significantly different (p = 0.007 and <0.001 respectively).
Fig 4.
Line plot of the Priority Scores for each variable when scheduling a patient for theatre, with the impact of high, moderate and low Hospital Bed Stress (A) and Critical Care Bed Stress (B) compared. Note: Higher score demonstrates a higher priority.
Table 4.
Priority Scores for the six variables considered when scheduling patients for theatre, presented for all responses and by Hospital Bed Stress and Critical Bed Stress strata.