Hospitals’ “drastic” cancellation of surgeries during the Covid-19 lockdown will add to SA’s excess deaths as a result of the pandemic and increase inequality in health care.

This is the conclusion of surgeons at four leading medical schools, who have conducted one of the world’s first surveys of changes in hospital surgical practice during lockdown.

Revealing the findings in the SA Medical Journal (http://www.samj.org.za/index.php/samj/article/view/13024/9399), lead author Kathryn Chu, professor of global surgery at Stellenbosch University, said the first 12 weeks of lockdown had left a backlog of more than 150,000 surgical cases...