Introduction
Coronaviruses (CoV) are a large family of RNA viruses which can lead to
various infections from self-limiting mild upper respiratory infections
to serious life-threatening infections like Middle East Respiratory
Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
(SARS).1-3 At December 2019, cases of pneumonia with
unknown etiology were reported in Wuhan, Hubei province of
China.4 At the beginning of the January 2020; the 2019
novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) was isolated and World Health Organization
(WHO) named this virus as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus
2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease resulting with pneumonia as Coronavirus
Disease 2019 (Covid-19).2 Covid-19 spread rapidly from
country to country and as a result WHO declared Covid-19 as a pandemic
on the March 11th 2020.5 Worldwide
total cases and the number of deaths reached 14.348.858 and 603.691,
respectively.6 The first case in Turkey was reported
at 11 March 2020 and the peak of daily cases and deaths were seen during
the 4th week of the pandemic curve in our
country.6
The workload of hospitals has increased considerably during the pandemic
process and many healthcare measures were taken by governments and
hospital systems. Most of the hospitals turned to pandemic or quarantine
hospitals and had to serve only Covid-19 patients. Some detailed
recommendations were published for the triage of urological surgeries
during the Covid-19 pandemic.7-10 Like other surgical
subspecialties; cancellation of elective surgeries and utilization of
solely emergent surgeries and non-deferrable oncologic surgeries that
delay may cause negative impact on survival have been performed in
urology clinics according the triage
recommendations.11 Also, urological outpatient clinics
have been adapted to new social distancing rules in Covid-19 pandemic;
the number of appointments was limited and only emergent patients could
be treated in most of the urology clinics in worldwide as in our
country.8,12,13
In this report, we aimed to present a nation-wide analysis of the
workload of urology departments in Turkey week-by-week during Covid-19
pandemic and to compare the outcomes with the same time interval of the
year 2019.