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COVID-19 among medical personnel in the operating room

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2020

Pathum Sookaromdee*
Affiliation:
TWS Medical Center, BangkokThailand
Viroj Wiwanitkit
Affiliation:
Dr DY Patil University, Pune, India Hainan Medical University, Haikou, China Chulalongkorn University, BangkokThailand
*
Author for correspondence: Pathum Sookaromdee, E-mail: pathumsook@gmail.com
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Abstract

Type
Letter to the Editor
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© 2020 by The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. All rights reserved.

To the Editor—Surgical infection is an important issue in hospital infection control; infection can occur in a patient receiving an operation. With the new coronavirus infection, COVID-19, there is a risk of nosocomial infection. GlauserReference Glauser1 proposed a protocol to keep COVID-19 out of hospitals. However, the infection might be carried by medical personnel. The issue of COVID-19 among medical personnel working in the operating room has not been well clarified.

Here, we provide reports from Thailand, a country with the second-most COVID-19 infections at one point in the worldwide outbreak timeline.Reference Yasri and Wiwanitkit2 As of March 27, 2020, there were 1,136 patients with COVID-19 in Thailand, and 2 of these were medical personnel working in operating rooms. These cases occurred in 2 different rural hospitals. The first case was an anesthesiologist and the second case was an internist working as a surgeon. These 2 patients had regular work rotations in operating rooms during the presymptomatic COVID-19 period. Surveillance for possible transmission to patients and other personnel is presently under way.

In fact, COVID-19 has been sporadically reported in a patients receiving surgery, causing special attention to be focused on management techniques related to patients.Reference Tian, Hu, Niu, Liu, Xu and Xiao3,Reference Li, Liu, Zhao, Liu, Zhang, Dong, Xu, Zhao, Wei, Song, Chen and Chen4 However, no reports have been published on COVID-19 among members of the medical teams who practice in operating rooms. Although surgical infection studies usually focus on patients, it is important to give attention to the practitioners who work in operation room as well.

Acknowledgments

Financial support

No financial support was provided relevant to this article.

Conflicts of interest

All authors report no conflicts of interest relevant to this article.

References

Glauser, W. Proposed protocol to keep COVID-19 out of hospitals. CMAJ 2020;192(10):e264e265.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yasri, S, Wiwanitkit, V. Editorial: Wuhan coronavirus outbreak and imported case. Adv Trop Med Pub Health Int 2020;10:12.Google Scholar
Tian, S, Hu, W, Niu, L, Liu, H, Xu, H, Xiao, SY. Pulmonary pathology of early-phase 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pneumonia in two patients with lung cancer. J Thorac Oncol 2020 Feb 28. pii: S1556-0864(20)30132-5.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Li, X, Liu, M, Zhao, Q, Liu, R, Zhang, H, Dong, M, Xu, S, Zhao, H, Wei, S, Song, Z, Chen, G, Chen, J. Preliminary recommendations for lung surgery during 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic period. Zhongguo Fei Ai Za Zhi 2020;23:133135.Google ScholarPubMed