Multidisciplinary approach for rare thoracic tumors during COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic started in March 2020 (1) and since then it has dramatically changed the diagnostic and therapeutic management of many chronic diseases, including cancer. During the first lockdown, overwhelmed healthcare systems could not guarantee regular access to early cancer diagnosis screening campaigns, as well as to clinical and radiological followup of cancer patients, causing a potential diagnostic and therapeutic delay (2), whose effects have been seen in the short-term and may continue to be seen for the next few years. However, life-saving cancer therapies were among the few health services guaranteed, even during the hardest phase of pandemic, as they have been made accessible by implementing effective triage procedures (3). In this commentary, we describe the peculiar clinical features of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection in patients with rare thoracic tumors, including thymic epithelial tumors (TET) and mediastinal germ cell tumors, and focus on the importance of multidisciplinary clinical management of these diseases.