COVID-19 and the Severity of the Disease in Different Types of Cancer

Eben von Well

Germplasm Development, ARC-Small Grain, South Africa

Dr. Eben von Well, Germplasm Development, ARC-Small Grain, South Africa.

Keywords: Cancer; COVID-19; Severity; Treatments

Abstract

Italy, Spain and the USA suffered the most in the early stages of the world wide outbreak of COVID-19 and subsequently the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic on 12 March 2020. Cancer patients with comorbidities (hypertension, diabetes and cardiorenovascular diseases) can lead to severe illness and death as cancer patients have a higher risk of severe illness and death than COVID-19 patients without cancer. Severe COVID-19 reflects dysregulated inflammation and it has been repeatedly shown that inflammation could produce a hypercoagulable state in cancer patients. Cancer patients that obtain COVID19 are treated according to the appropriate symptoms and oxygen therapy. Cancer patients that are prior cancer therapy, receiving therapy and post therapy are treated differently for the control of the progression of their cancers as well as the possibility of obtaining COVID-19. Cancer patients under active oncological therapy as well as those who received antitumor therapy within 14 days before diagnosis are at elevated risk for severe complications and show a higher mortality rate due to COVID-19. A higher proportion of severe COVID-19 was also connected to immune checkpoint inhibitor treatments. It is reported that COVID-19 positive patients that had surgery are likely to be at higher risk of clinically severe events than those who did not have surgery. Postponing certain cancer surgeries may be associated with increased risk of progression; although the impact of surgical waiting times for different cancers may vary. For patients that already started with radiotherapy, finishing treatment is a priority, either following initial planned fractionation schedules or after planned recalculation to shorten treatment duration.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).