Celebrating the 10th Anniversary

A: (Mengyuan Dai) As we faced the COVID-19 global pandemic, it was urgent to determine how COVID-19 infection affects patients with cancer.

A: (Dianbo Liu & Mauricio Santillana) At the beginning of the pandemic, frontline clinicians lacked quantitative data for vulnerability of patients with cancers to COVID-19.

A: (Hongbing Cai) We therefore conducted a multi-center study focusing on the clinical characteristics of COVID-19 patients with cancer in 14 hospitals in Hubei province, China.

A: (Hongbing Cai) Our results indicated that patients with cancer appear more vulnerable to COVID-19. Furthermore, individualized treatment plans need to be developed based on tumor types and stages.

A: (Dianbo Liu & Mauricio Santillana) Our study identified and quantified increased vulnerability to COVID-19 among cancer patients, but also significant variation of vulnerability to COVID-19 among patients with different types and stages of cancers, which served as a starting point for many later studies.

A: (Dianbo Liu & Mauricio Santillana) Our findings provided information needed by clinicians and patients worldwide in the largest pandemic in the past 100 years.

A: (Miao Liu) I received many emails from the US and other countries since we published our findings, most of them from patients with cancer or their relatives. In their emails, they stated that they got some useful knowledge about the association between cancer and COVID-19 from our paper. They also asked some additional questions about protection of patients with cancer facing SARS-CoV-2 beyond the paper’s conclusions, and I have tried my best to help them. I am excited that I can help so many people. If patients with cancer or oncologists can get some experience and prevention strategies from our paper, that would be the greatest impact.

A: (Vikas Mehta, Sanjay Goel, Rafi Kabarriti, Balazs Halmos, Amit Verma) As the COVID pandemic was evolving throughout the United States and globally, New York City was unfortunately an area where the virus had disseminated unabated before all the measures meant to curb its spread had been implemented. Sadly, we observed the devastating effect this disease had on the Bronx cancer population. We felt that disseminating this message was a moral imperative to help prevent the excess morbidity and mortality COVID-19 could impart on cancer patients in other populations, and further inform and embolden hospitals and cancer centers to take measures to protect their cancer patients.

A: (Vikas Mehta, Sanjay Goel, Rafi Kabarriti, Balazs Halmos, Amit Verma) We were surprised to learn that patients receiving active treatment were not significantly more likely to succumb to COVID, thus informing us that it was safe to continue cancer treatment in patients with active cancer with appropriate precautions in place. Unfortunately, this delay in diagnosis and treatment will likely be a devastating downstream consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic that we are just beginning to see throughout the world. In addition, we were able to refine specific patient characteristics, such as age, performance status and co-morbidities that drastically impact adverse outcomes- findings that have been repeatedly corroborated since and helped clinicians balance for their patients risks/benefits of ongoing cancer-directed therapy/need for enhanced protective measures throughout the pandemic.

A: (Vikas Mehta, Sanjay Goel, Rafi Kabarriti, Balazs Halmos, Amit Verma) The paper’s greatest impact has been the dissemination of the information regarding the risk of COVID-19 mortality for cancer patients, and specifically those with certain cancer types (hematologic, lung etc). Additionally, it has helped inform us regarding the need for “safe practices” to prevent COVID-19 infection in our cancer population as well as to help garner support for early vaccination priority for those people living with cancer.