The initial pandemic-induced cancellations of elective procedures in the US between March and April 2020 had devastated its general surgery devices market, as over 50% of general surgeries had been cancelled and the related devices’ markets had similarly declined during those months. However, the US surgery devices market is resilient against the pandemic in 2021, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

GlobalData’s market analysis of general surgery devices sales has revealed that during the initial wave of the pandemic, the general surgery devices market had been negatively impacted. However, in subsequent surges of COVID-19 cases and deaths, such as in January and September 2021, sales were relatively unaffected.

Brian Hicks, Senior Analyst of Medical Devices at GlobalData, comments: “The general surgery devices market is tightly correlated with elective procedure volumes. 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.

“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. 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 this year, 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.

Hicks concludes: “Despite many instances of local and regional cancellations of elective surgeries already 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. 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.”