question: The COVID-19 pandemic changed elective surgery routine. During the initial spread of the novel coronavirus, elective surgery has been stopped and only emergency and trauma and oncologic procedures were allowed. Following the decrease of the contagion curve, elective surgery is slowly being recovered. The hospitals should create a pre-hospitalization path to identify possible infected patient and further postpone surgery. In this setting, cartilage repair surgery should not be neglected, because this could potentially lead to an increase of patients needing major joint replacement surgery.