U.S. General Surgery Devices Market Unaffected by COVID-19

COVID-19 was no match for the U.S. general surgery market last year.

After being devastated by the virtual shutdown of general surgery during March and April 2020, the market bounced back in 2021 and showed its resilience against the virus, according to GlobalData. 

“The general surgery devices market is tightly correlated with elective procedure volumes,” said Brian Hicks, a senior analyst of medical devices at GlobalData. “In 2021, the scale of elective procedure cancellations during the substantial COVID-19 surges had been much more limited than originally implemented in March 2020, which explains why the devices market remained resilient.”
 
GlobalData’s market analysis of general surgery devices sales indicates the general surgery devices market had been negatively impacted during the initial wave of the pandemic. Also, in subsequent surges of COVID-19 cases and deaths, such as in January and September 2021, sales were relatively still unaffected.  
 
“Unlike before, policies regarding elective procedure cancellations were more often made at the individual hospital or hospital system levels, thus enabling relatively unaffected medical facilities to continue their procedures. Also, as many important lessons were learned from the initial wave of the pandemic, the front-end and back-end operations of hospital systems had significantly improved,” Hicks noted. “These include improved patient triaging, performing important ambulatory surgeries that would not take away critical hospital bed capacities, and acquiring key supplies like personal protective equipment (PPE) and COVID-19 tests.”
 
Due to the reduced cancellations of general surgeries in 2021, sales of the associated devices had not notably declined. On the contrast, our analysis indicates that sales had almost consistently exceeded the pre-pandemic levels, which highlights not only the rebound of the market but ‘surges in sales’ to make up for the initial losses from March and April 2020.
 
While the general surgery device market has mostly been performing at or higher than pre-pandemic levels in 2021, it still faces continued threats of emerging coronavirus variants like Omicron to induce some widespread elective procedure cancellations.
 
“Despite many instances of local and regional cancellations of elective surgeries happening due to the Omicron variant, the general surgery devices market is likely to continue and maintain the current level, if not grow even more,” Hicks said. “This is because the hospitalization rates from this variant remain low so far, and improved hospital operations with increased supplies will enable elective procedure volumes to sustain at current levels.”