COVID-19: The Impact in Oncology Care

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a critical challenge to the current oncology care and practices including late diagnoses, delayed anti-cancer treatment, and static clinical trials. With the increasing risk of cancer patients acquiring infection during receiving the essential care, the debate ensues on how to balance the risk factors and benefits out of the oncologic emergencies in cancer patients. In this review article, we have focused on the current global re-organization of the integrity and effectiveness of the treatment modalities depending on the patient and cancer-specific urgencies while minimizing exposure to the infection. In this review, we addressed how the worldwide oncology community is united to share therapy schemes and the best possible guidelines to help cancer patients, and to strategize and execute therapy/trial protocols. This review provides collective knowledge on the current re-structuring of the general framework that prioritizes cancer care with the available exploitation of the reduced resources and most importantly the unparalleled levels of companionship as a large health care community towards the need to offer the best possible care to the patients.

Keywords: Cancer; MERS; SARS; SARS-CoV-2.

Fig. 1

Characterization of SARS-CoV-2 RBD: a Multiple sequence alignment of RBDs of SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV, and MERS-CoV. b-c I-tasser online server (https://zhanglab.ccmb.med.umich.edu/I-TASSER/) was used to generate a predicted model of the S-protein Receptor binding domain of SARS-CoV2, SARS-CoV, and MERS-CoV to get an idea about the shape of the individual molecules. The structure of SARS-CoV-2 S (blue) and SARS-CoV S (pink) and MERS-CoV (Orange) RBD domain was superimposed which denotated probable alteration of this binding domain. GenBank accession numbers are QHR63250.2 (SARS-CoV-2 S), ABB29898.2 (SARS-CoV S), and AFS88936.1 (MERS-CoV S)