Guest Editorial

The global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has led to expectations of global deaths numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Promising therapeutic strategies have emerged slower than society would prefer. COVID-related deaths in the United States exceed 86,000 as of this writing, with projections as high as 134,000.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, NCI estimated that about 3% to 5% of adult cancer patients participated in clinical trials.

In the past decade, there has been a growing interest in capitalizing on advances in information technology to provide quality and patient-centered care to cancer patients and survivors outside a hospital or clinic setting.

As part of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals across the nation had dramatically reduced their surgery schedules when UC Davis cancer patient Marlene Blake had surgery for breast cancer in March.

This pandemic has affected a lot of people, both physicians and patients, physically as well as emotionally.

March 1, 2020, started as a good day at the Montefiore Einstein Center for Cancer Care in New York.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a host of diagnostic, treatment, and follow-up problems for patients with cancer of all types, and this is particularly true for patients with lung cancer, their families, and health care providers.

In late December, rumors regarding a dangerous virus that originated in a seafood market in Wuhan, China started spreading across the world. At the time, all we knew was that the virus resembled the severe acute respiratory syndrome, better known as SARS, and that it was aggressive and deadly.

While the news these days is rightly focused on hospitals and the government fighting public enemy number one, aka COVID-19 (the novel coronavirus), independent community oncology practices continue to treat and comfort patients who are at war with that insidious disease we call cancer.