LAUSR

It therefore demonstrated that there was no scientific evidence to support the Recommendations, and that therefore these were based solely on expert opinion. 4. There are space constraints in publishing the Recommendations. To report details of the SR when it concludes that there is no literature to report is pointless. 5. The fact that it is available on PubMed (PMID: 32803277) is nothing to do with the authors but suggests someone feels that listing it is worthwhile. As for mistaking the SR as informing the Recommendations, the key to the Results is the section immediately before headed Consensus. We agree that we did not report the actual process of reaching agreement on the Recommendations, but experts suggesting recommendations and then passing round to the rest for agreement, and then the process of collecting these into a coherent document, is neither interesting nor important. There was not time to undertake a more formal process such as the Delphi method. It should be noted that the time from the first wave to the second was short, and yet the whole process from conception to publication was achieved before the second wave started. The section on the effect of delays on the outcome of arthroplasty presumes that the SR was used to support the views. We leave it to the readers to decide whether there has never been any evidence to show “that a delay in arthroplasty leads to an impaired outcome.” KSSTA is the official journal of ESSKA of which the European Knee Associates is a section. It is perfectly reasonable to publish recommendations; conflict of interest is irrelevant. We look forward to the correspondents reporting their recommendations for the Dutch Orthopaedic Society on guidelines on restarting elective surgery in the presence of SARSCoV-2.