COVID-19 Delays in Gynecologic Surgery and Their Association with Race, Ethnicity and Insurance Status

This article is made available for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.Study Objective To characterize how surgical delays and cancellations experienced by patients needing gynecologic surgery differed during the coronavirus pandemic compared to pre-pandemic and determine if the delay and cancellation rates varied based on the patient's race, ethnicity or insurance type. Design Retrospective cohort study. Setting Urban, academic, tertiary care medical center. Patients or Participants Women aged >18 years who underwent surgery for benign or malignant gynecologic conditions. Interventions None. Measurements and Main Results Pre-COVID included surgeries performed between 3/2019-2/2020 and COVID included surgeries between 3/2020-2/2021. In the pre-COVID group, 1107 cases had no surgical delay (75.3%), 364 cases had surgical delay or cancellation (24.7%). In the COVD group, 1042 cases had no surgical delay (75.5%), 339 cases had surgical delay or cancellation (24.5%). Of delayed surgeries, there was a significant difference in the median number of days to surgery in the COVID-19 group of 31.2 days (13.9-56.0) as compared to the pre-COVID group 14.0 days (7.0-34.8) (p