The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

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SYK - from last week's CC RE July Cov-2 impact on recovery in procedures. Also, similar comments from both companies about robotics adoption seeing yoy growth.

Larry Biegelsen

That's helpful. And then did that improvement in July also applied to the U.S.? And if so, you know, qualitatively, how are hospitals in the U.S. dealing with the spikes that we're all obviously seeing here? Thanks for taking the question.

Kevin Lobo

Yes, it certainly includes the United States, and obviously, our business is more heavily weighted to the U.S. And so as that U.S. recovery improves that certainly is terrific for Stryker. Even in Florida today, we're seeing hospitals continuing to do surgeries. And so that -- it's not as if we were -- we're going through what we went through in April. Hospitals for the most part have been pretty well equipped. They are segregating their COVID patients from the areas where they can do surgery. I'm not saying that universally, some hospitals in Arizona, they chose to close elective surgeries down for a week. We saw that, but then they resumed a week after. So I think this notion of complete shutdowns, I don't think we're going to see that unless we have some type of rampant change in the way the virus is mutating and spreading. So, I don't expect that. I think we will have flare ups. And the reason we don't want to give guidance is it's hard to predict the nature of those flare ups and how big those flare ups will be, but even today in the -- in Texas and in Florida and in Arizona surgeries are going on, and that gives us cause for optimism for -- certainly for Q3 and beyond.