key: cord-1054527-f6c4ga67
authors: Wei, Shuhua; Wang, Junjie
title: How to manage tumour radiotherapy during COVID‐19 pandemic?
date: 2020-09-29
journal: Eur J Cancer Care (Engl)
DOI: 10.1111/ecc.13288
sha: f87bdf7e1ec09d70b5f5659f28019d0dc8b80044
doc_id: 1054527
cord_uid: f6c4ga67

nan

identified infection in the world except China is 489,448 cases and 23,193(4.7%) cases of them have passed away. A study reported that cancer patients have higher risk of infection, severe symptoms, more rapid deterioration and poorer outcome once infected, compared with non-cancer patients, due to older age, smoking history, diverse comorbidities and the immunosuppressive status after chemotherapy, surgery or even immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) regimen (Liang et al., 2020) . Although the subsequent comments doubted whether it is sufficient to conclude the association between cancer with COVID-19, the first report concerning COVID-19 sufferers with cancer indeed proposed the close attention on the protection of cancer patients that was previously neglected (Wang & Zhang, 2020; Xia, Jin, Zhao, Li, & Shen, 2020) .

It is estimated that approximately 50%-60% of cancer patients require radiotherapy (Weichselbaum, Liang, Deng, & Fu, 2017) . At the onset of the outbreak, cancer patients were in different stages of radiotherapy, such as ongoing radiotherapy, ongoing treatment-plan designing before radiotherapy and the time point to radiotherapy for concurrent chemoradiotherapy. However, as a result of the long period of radiotherapy, patients have to frequently go to and from the hospital which increases the risk of infection. Thus, how to ensure the progress of radiotherapy for cancer patients, protect patients from COVID-19, avoid tumour progression as a result of changing F I G U R E 1 The management procedure of COVID-19 suspected case in clinic and ward

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