Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic and Related Lockdown on Eye Emergencies Accesses

Since the end of 2019, an outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), originating in the Chinese city of Wuhan has spread rapidly worldwide causing thousands of deaths. Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is supported by SARS-CoV-2 and represents the causative agent of a potentially fatal disease that is of great global public health concern. Italy has been the first European country recording an elevated number of infected forcing the Italian Government to call for total lockdown. The lockdown had the aim to limit the spread of infection through social distancing. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the pandemic has affected the patient's accesses to the Ophthalmological Emergency Department of a tertiary referral center in northern Italy, during the lockdown period. The charts of all patients that came to the Emergency Department during the lockdown period (February -May, 2020 and October - December 2020) will be retrospectively collected and compared with those in the same periods of 2019 .

All demographics and clinical data will be analyzed and compared to evaluate differences and type of accesses.