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The novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in December 2019 in China and quickly spread throughout the world, causing a pandemic. The most vulnerable to the virus were patients with immunodeficiencies, cardiac pathology, and diabetes mellitus. According to international data, the infection rate in cancer patients is higher than in the general population 1. The presence of cancer and hematological diseases in patients significantly aggravated the course of coronavirus infection SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19). According to foreign data, more than 80% of hematological patients required hospitalization, 50% of them had a severe course of the disease. About 15% of patients from this cohort required treatment and observation in the intensive care unit (ICU) due to the severity of their condition, and mortality rates ranged from 30% to 40% 2. During the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, carrying out specific antitumor treatment in hematological patients has become one of the challenging tasks. As a rule, hematological diseases, such as acute leukemia, require immediate initiation of antitumor treatment, since delaying its initiation potentially worsens the patient’s prognosis. However, when choosing one or another tactic of chemotherapy and the timing of its initiation, it is necessary to evaluate all the risks and expected benefits for the patient, taking into account his age, possible long-term persistence of the virus, the high probability of secondary bacterial/fungal infection against the background of myelotoxic aplasia of bone marrow hematopoiesis, decompensation of associated diseases due to COVID-19 in patients of the older age group. This article presents a clinical example of the course of coronavirus infection COVID-19 in an elderly patient with acute myeloid leukemia, and discusses diagnostic and treatment tactics in a pandemic.
Shimanovskaya et al. (Tue,) studied this question.