Letter to the Editor|Volume 12, Issue 9|pp 7619—7625

Preventive strategy for the clinical treatment of hip fractures in the elderly during the COVID-19 outbreak: Wuhan’s experience

Jing Liu¹, Bobin Mi¹, Liangcong Hu¹, Yuan Xiong¹, Hang Xue¹, Wu Zhou¹, Faqi Cao¹, Mengfei Liu¹, Lang Chen¹, Chenchen Yan¹, Hui Li¹, Guohui Liu¹

¹Department of Orthopedics, Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430022, China

Received: March 28, 2020Published: May 7, 2020

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103201

Copyright © 2020 Liu et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Hip fractures in the elderly account for more than half of osteoporotic fractures and represent a substantial economic and social burden. Novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19), which began to spread in December 2019, has created challenges in the management of elderly hip fracture patients, not only by influencing the choice of operation and postoperative rehabilitation methods, but also by generating new risks for the medical staff. During this period, our infection and orthopedic treatment unit in the center of the epidemic area effectively treated 82 elderly patients with hip fracture, and no cross-infection occurred. Therefore, our experience in prevention and treatment is worth recommending to frontline anti-epidemic personnel.