People staying at home during the coronavirus pandemic are contributing to a rise in the number of orthopedic injuries, FOX61 reports.
A lot of these orthopedic injuries are due to people picking up activities that they typically wouldn't, such as home-improvement, according to Lisa Lattanza, MD, chair of orthopedic surgery and rehabilitation at New Haven, Conn.-based Yale School of Medicine.
"We are seeing an uptick in the number of injuries from skill saws, routers [and] things like that that are used in home-improvement as well as injuries from people doing things maybe they wouldn't do if they had time to stop and think," Dr. Lattanza told Fox61.
These avoidable orthopedic injuries are placing added pressure on the healthcare system, which is already struggling with a significant influx of patients who have contracted COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.
"People are getting cabin fever and that's why some of these things are happening," Dr. Lattanza said. "We don't want people ... who don't need to be in the emergency department exposed to the people in the emergency department that may have COVID-19."