The COVID-19 pandemic and nuclear cardiology: An opportunity to grow stronger?
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Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA Division of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
Received Sep 9, 2020; accepted Sep 10, 2020 doi:10.1007/s12350-020-02383-y
See related article, doi:https://doi.org/10. 1007/s12350-020-02286-y. ‘‘In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity’’ - Albert Einstein On March 11th, 2020 the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic.1 By then, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 had spread to 114 countries and affected 118,000 cases. Given the exponential surge in the number of cases and constraints placed on hospital resources, national health authorities implemented total or partial lockdown procedures or stay-at-home orders or advisories. Healthcare systems, hospitals and practitioners canceled or postponed most (if not all) elective and non-urgent visits, tests and procedures at once. Only essential and urgent encounters were conducted. This unprecedented operational shift happened essentially over a brief period of time (overnight?). Several healthcare leaders were calling their colleagues elsewhere asking for help and sharing ideas. However, the circumstances were unique, unparalleled for everyone and healthcare professionals had to be creative and resourceful while mitigating the risk of infection spread, promoting safety for healthcare workers and patients, and following national and local orders and infection control recommendations.
Reprint requests: Hicham Skali, MD, MSc, FACC, Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis St, Boston, MA 02115; [email protected] J Nucl Cardiol 1071-3581/$34.00 Copyright Ó 2020 American Society of Nuclear Cardiology.
Italy, with Spain and France, was one of the most hardly hit countries in the beginning of the pandemic. By the end of April 2020, just 6 weeks into the pandemic, there had been 179,192 cases and 28,236 deaths. Italian doctors, nurses, technologists, and administrators were pulled into a battle to manage the thousands of daily new cases, and hundreds needing a hospital or ICU admission. At the same time, other non-COVID-19 conditions, including cardiovascular or oncologic, continued to present, though at a much lower rate2 or much later in the disease course. In this issue of the journal, Scrima et al. provide an early account of their initial experience in establishing an ad hoc protocol that allowed them to continue providing nuclear cardiology services during the pandemic. This protocol required multi-disciplinary collaboration between clinicians, technologists and administrators. It was based on proper case selection and prioritization, detailed screening for symptoms and risky contacts on days before and day of the procedure, protocol modification to allow for shortened scans based on stress first, as well as universal face-mas
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