As the Covid-19 outbreak spread from February into March, it made sense that hospitals would face massive challenges around maintaining enough staff and equipment to handle an influx of patients. Still, it might’ve seemed antithetical that a global health crisis could be ruinous from a business perspective.

UBS’ Evidence Lab has created a proprietary dataset that shows that for all hospitals reporting so far—17% of US hospitals—average surgical volume was down 26% in March 2020 compared to