Due to the pandemic, a decrease in retina visits has been noted. Photo: Leonid Skorin Jr., DO, OD, MS.

Researchers recently reported findings on community mobility and retina visits during 2020, noting that their data on pandemic behavior may offer insight into how communities in the United States prioritize retina visits—or fail to. They said some of the fluctuations in visits may be due to pandemic surges and added that injection visits were the most resistant to decline and rebounded earlier.

The researchers linked more than two million outpatient retina clinic visits to population mobility by combining public datasets such as the Google Community Mobility Reports and the CDC’s data. They measured changes across 332 counties.

The team reported a decrease in daily-average retina visits by 7%, 19%, 5% and 4%, respectively, during the four quarters of 2020. The decrease was negatively correlated with increased incident COVID deaths for the first three quarters of 2020 and increased incident cases for the first two quarters. They noted that the number of daily-average retina visits was significantly lower for metropolitan counties, relative to baseline, for the first two quarters vs. rural and urban counties. They stated that the decline in retina visits was most greatly associated with a decline in workplace visits in the first three quarters.

“The most unique aspect of our study is the correlation of retina visits with Google Community Mobility Data, as an effort to evaluate how population mobility and social distancing correlates with clinical visit attendance,” they wrote. They noted regional variations may reflect different behavioral patterns seen in metropolitan and rural areas.