Dr. Kenneth Hughes, Los Angeles Plastic Surgeon, has taken a huge financial loss personally over the last several months as the proscribed closing has resulted in complete loss of income with continued bills for rent, payroll, services, etc.   The near future looks bleak for many businesses and some may have to close as a result.  Tommaso Pellegatta, MD et al, recently published an article about these same concerns for plastic surgery and those businesses in other countries like Italy and Sweden.

The world has encountered many changes over the years, and what is happening now is a big shift. We have to adapt to a new way of living and working during a frightening scenario in which people are losing their jobs and businesses are being destroyed after a lifetime of effort to create them. Many plastic surgeons have decided to dedicate themselves exclusively to the aesthetic field, yet their practice is now banned in most countries. Financially surviving is a big challenge, and unfortunately many of us are facing it and will have to continue to deal with it in the upcoming months. Scientific data in the last week have shown that the initial models will be off by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude and that work may resume for much of the world in the near future.

Additionally, we are experiencing terrible and possibly irreversible damage to our livelihoods from this crisis. Although we must take action to control the spread of the pandemic and save lives, we must also take action to protect our livelihoods and our jobs.10 Mainstream media and social media have often inaccurately written arguments against nonselective isolation as being a matter of lives vs the economy; however, it is truly lives vs lives because the economic effects of prolonged lockdown strategies have not been modeled anywhere close to what the COVID-19 virus has been. However, the mortality of economic effects would be orders of magnitude higher. Experts around the world have explained this in detail, especially in recent weeks.