Measures taken to alleviate the impact of COVID‐19 outbreak on surgical patients

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has brought numerous challenges to the public health system since December 2019. Chinese government, hospitals, and doctors have made tremendous efforts to restrain the pandemic. All patients with fever or pneumonia of undetermined origin or suspected COVID-19 infection are being transferred to COVID-19-designated hospitals for diagnosis and quarantine. To confront the massive demand of human and medical resources, a large number of medical professionals from various specialties have been voluntarily grouped together to support the front line against COVID-19, 1 and medical supplies are centralized in relevant departments. All these strict measures were taken as earlier as possible and had showed effectiveness in controlling the rapid spread of COVID-19. As the number of new infections has been declining since February, we have achieved tremendous success in containing COVID-19 infection and transmission in China and our experience of battling against this epidemic is valuable for the rest of the world. 2 At the same time, the outbreak exerted tremendous impacts on surgical patients in China. Elective surgeries dropped by 70-95% in Chinese hospitals during the epidemic (Figure 1A). 3 The shortage of medical resources such as personal protective equipment and blood, and the strict administrative policy for preventing infection are the main reasons. In addition, due to the possible person-toperson infection in hospitals, surgical patients refrained from coming to hospital to seek medical care. However, certain surgical patients, such as acute abdomen, digestive tumors, cholelithiasis, gastrointestinal bleeding, and abdominal injury, are likely to face worse outcomes without timely surgery. Therefore, another issue arose as how to provide safe and high-quality surgical care to patients during the COVID-19 outbreak. In this regard, Chinese hospitals have taken following measures based the protocols from the National Health Commission of China and experience learned from the fight against SARS. 4 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.