I can speak generally about my system and specifically about my orthopedic group. Non-emergent and non-critical care for some conditions has been delayed or reduced, but there are multiple efforts to compensate. Telemedicine/telehealth has grown tremendously from the pandemic, and it's far easier to schedule telehealth visits now. For many things that might have otherwise required a primary care or urgent care visit (particularly those that can be fixed with a simple script or two), a few minutes with a smartphone can get you what you need. The other big push has been for an increase in preventative care--you know, getting patients to do what they are supposed to be doing to stay healthy. The focus on washing hands, wearing masks, and not touching faces can be a sort of a trial for some people to see if/how they can adopt the self-discipline necessary for employing measures to prevent (or, failing that, control) other conditions. Unfortunately, many of them really lack any self-discipline.
Sorry, dinner calls. More later.
Thanks for this. Yes wrt primary care, that has been my experience. Faster and more convenient to access than ever, as long as things can be dealt with virtually. I like that a lot, and I hope that is a lasting legacy of this pandemic. In-person visits and gp-ordered tests do still exist, though they have been truncated. Not sure how hard they are to get, it hasn't come up.
And Emergency is way quiet now. And fast, faster than ever. That's one rapid way to get diagnosis for more serious conditions and access to specialist care.
It's not like non-Covid medicine doesn't exist, in some ways it seems more streamlined now, but I still can't help wondering how many chronic, slowly emerging conditions are slipping between the cracks.
EDITED TO ADD: where I am, hospital resources have been carefully marshalled in anticipation of an overwhelming surge. The overwhelming surge never happened, and our curve is flat now. Covid never did overwhelm capacity, so things are already going back to normal. That may or may not mean the marshalling was never necessary or that it was an overreaction. Or that it won't be necessary in the future. We certainly had case clusters and death clusters. I honestly don't know. There's going to be a whole lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking over this.