Maxime K. Collard (MD)¹ , Jérémie H. Lefèvre (MD-PhD)¹ , François Batteux² , Yann Parc (MDPhD)¹ , On behalf of the APHP / Universities / Inserm COVID-19 research collaboration.

• ¹ Digestive Surgery Department, Saint-Antoine Hospital, APHP, Sorbonne University, 75012 Paris, France.
• ² Department of Strategy and transformation, Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP).

Dear Editor,
Because of the rapid worldwide propagation of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019), each health care system had to urgently adapt with all efforts aimed to maximize the capacity of treatment for infected patients. With this in mind, the President of the French Republic declared on March 12, 2020: “Non-essential hospital care will be postponed, i.e. surgical procedures that are not urgent.” But, in spite of the effort deployed by each hospital to provide a sufficient capacity of treatment for patients requiring a surgical procedure as an emergency, we have observed that the management of these patients have been largely affected, not because of a lack of resources but because of a surprising lack of patients. Consequently we analyzed the surgical activity from 12/03/2020 to 29/04/2020 in 16 adult gastrointestinal surgery departments within 14 French public university hospitals located in Paris or its close suburbs. The first day of this period corresponded to the date of the President's request to postpone planned surgery. The surgical procedures performed during this period were compared to those performed in 2019 over the equivalent period (14/03/2019-01/05/2019) and in the same surgical departments.

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