Appropriate arrangement of cancer treatment after COVID-19 epidemic peaks in China
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Appropriate arrangement of cancer treatment after COVID‑19 epidemic peaks in China Hongnan Mo1 · Binliang Liu1 · Fei Ma1 Received: 10 May 2020 / Accepted: 25 May 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Purpose COVID-19 is causing a lot of problems in health services around the world, especially in medical institutions receiving cancer patients. On March 12, China’s National Health Commission announced that the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic has passed in China. Thus, a proper arrangement of medication, surgery and radiotherapy for patients with cancer is of vital importance after the epidemic peak. Methods A range of measures have been implemented in our center. Specific patients take priority for chemotherapy treatment. The amount of semi-elective and elective surgeries could be gradually increased beyond urgent and emergency surgery. The hypofractionated radiotherapy is recommended in the right circumstances. Results On March 13, our center announced that more than 5000 visits of chemotherapy and radiotherapy are arranged in our outpatient clinics and none of our patients and staffs have been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of March 28, 2020. Conclusion The rational arrangement we make now may be helpful to the future restoration of cancer treatments in other countries. Keyword COVID-19 · Patient arrangement · Chemotherapy · Surgery · Radiotherapy Dear Editor, The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been characterized as a pandemic by World Health Organization on March 11, 2020 (World Health Organization 2020). Since the immune-suppressive nature of cancer treatments, as well as the frequent hospital visits, cancers patients have a higher risk to getting COVID-19 and will have a poorer outcome compared to the general population (Jing et al. 2020; Liang et al. 2020). Most of cancer institutes, including National Cancer Center/Cancer Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in China, have postponed non-urgent appointments. A longer delay or an interruption of cancer treatment inevitably increases the risk of tumor progression. Hongnan Mo and Binliang Liu contributed equally to this work. * Fei Ma [email protected] 1
Department of Medical Oncology, National Cancer Center/ National Clinical Research Center for Cancer/Cancer Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, No. 17 Panjiayuan Nanli, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100021, China
China has been experiencing the outbreak of COVID-19 since December 2019. Drastic control measures substantially mitigated the spread of COVID-19 in China (Kraemer et al. 2020). On March 12, China’s National Health Commission announced that the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic has passed in China. Thus, a proper arrangement of medication, surgery and radiotherapy for patients with cancer is of vital importance after the epidemic peak. A range of measures have been implemented in our center. First, patients who underwent curative treatments, or those with a high recurrent risk, and had we
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