Ormeño and colleagues presented interesting findings on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on osteoporotic hip fractures in Chile. In their study, annual hip fracture rate was 273.6/100,000 in 2020 compared to 335.7/100,000, representing a decrease of 18.5% [1]. The authors explained that this decrease could be due to social distancing and confinement measures, as a result of which whole families were able to stay at home, which may in turn have had a protective effect against falls.

We performed a similar study in Germany using data from the Disease Analyzer database. The Disease Analyzer database includes data on demographic variables, diagnoses, and prescriptions obtained in general and specialized practices in Germany [2]. For this study, we used data from 689 general practitioners and 124 orthopedic practices. We included individuals aged 50 or older with a diagnosis of hip fracture (ICD-10: S72) between 2016 and 2021.

Figure 1 shows numbers of patients per practice separately for GPs and orthopedists. On average, there were 6.0 patients with a hip fracture per GP practice and 13.0 per orthopedists practice from 2016 to 2019. In 2020, each GP practice had on average 6.4 and each orthopedist practice 14.2 patients with hip fracture, representing an increase of 8.3% (GPs) and 7.2% (orthopedists). There was also no decrease in the number of patients per practice with hip fracture in 2021 (6.4 for GPs and 14.5 for orthopedists).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Number of patients with hip fracture diagnosis per practice from 2016 to 2021 in Germany

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The trend we observed in Germany is different from the trend which Ormeño and colleagues presented for Chile. Our results rather confirmed similar studies from the UK [3] and Norway [4] showing an increase in hip fractures during the pandemic. The difference between our results and those from the study performed in Chile may be due to the fact that we used data from outpatients and not hospital data. As many hospitals in Germany were treating COVID-19 patients during the pandemic, people with other diseases were often forced to rely on private practices for treatment. This may explain the decrease in hip fracture incidence in hospital settings and its increase in outpatient settings. For example, Schoeneberg et al. reported a decline in the number of traumatological patients in 71 trauma centers in Germany, although their study counted all traumas and not just hip fractures [5].