Coloradans delayed care in the early months of the pandemic. The consequences will last for years.

In the early days of the pandemic, emergency department physicians looked around and wondered: Where is everybody?

There were COVID-19 patients, of course, and the providers treating them had their hands full: a new virus, a shortage of protective gear, no well-identified treatments, a battery of unknowns.

But downstairs, ERs felt like ghost towns. Volumes plummeted, just as hospitals were bracing for an unprecedented rush. Sky Ridge Medical Center set up a tent outside of its emergency department, ready for a surge of COVID-19 patients on top of the regular stream of traumas and heart attacks and strokes.

“That tent was not used for one single day,” said Adam Barkin, an ER doctor and medical director at Sky Ridge. “... It was eerily quiet in the emergency departments around town and at Sky Ridge because we were waiting for the patients to come, and they never came in.”

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