ER visits down sharply as COVID-19 has people wary of hospitals

Emergency room visits in the United States have dropped sharply during the pandemic, underscoring concerns that people with serious medical conditions, like heart attacks, are avoiding hospitals, according to a new analysis released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As the coronavirus spread across the United States this spring, visits to emergency rooms decreased by 42% over four weeks in April, compared with the same period in 2019. The declines were greatest among women and children 14 and younger, and in the Northeast.

While there has been a recent rebound in visits, the CDC noted, the volume of visits remains significantly lower. Visits to the emergency room were down 26% in the last week of May, compared with figures from a year earlier.

While hospitals in hot spots like New York City were often overwhelmed by the numbers of seriously ill coronavirus patients, and admissions for infectious diseases and pneumonia climbed, there were drastic declines in the volume of patients who typically come to the emergency room for care.

“It was eerily quiet,”said Dr. Thomas Balcezak, the chief clinical officer for Yale New Haven Health, who recalled walking through his hospital system’s emergency departments at the peak of the epidemic and being struck by the lack of patients.

In a possible sign that patients were coming in later and sicker, he pointed to the CDC’s finding that visits for conditions like ventricular fibrillation had increased, suggesting that patients might have had heart attacks and initially stayed home.