It’s safe for most people to return to health care facilities, said Mercedes Carnethon, an epidemiologist and vice chair of the department of preventive medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. “Health care delivery teams have been thoughtful about setting up their offices in a way to reduce the probability of exposure by wearing protective health equipment such as masks and gloves, reducing the number of patients in the waiting room at any single time and converting those visits that can be done remotely to telehealth. In most cases, the health care provider’s office will welcome questions about safety from patients,” she said.

Women who had COVID-19 while pregnant showed evidence of placental injury, suggesting a new complication of the illness, researchers say. The good news from the small study of 16 women is that “most of these babies were delivered full-term after otherwise normal pregnancies,” said study senior author Dr. Jeffrey Goldstein. He’s assistant professor of pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

“Some surgeries can be postponed by a little bit, but this was certainly striking,” said Dr. Al Benson, a gastrointestinal oncologist at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. “This will continue to be a challenge, because as the pandemic begins to subside and we begin to schedule more normally, there’s going to be a lot of catch-up. We don’t want people to further postpone screenings, and we certainly don’t want to postpone surgeries.”

“The hospital was an ominous, nerve-racking and scary place for patients even before COVID,” said Dr. Lisa VanWagner, a transplant hepatologist at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. “Now you take a stressful situation like a pandemic and you tell people that they cannot have their normal support system while they’re in the hospital, and that really magnifies those fears.”