Transcript
My name is Ghassan Abou-Alfa, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
As we are all living through the COVID-19 pandemic, by all means many questions come and arise to all of us as humans. We're asking the same questions, like all patients as well, who are worried. We're worried about our families. We're worried about our patients. We're all worried about everybody. And by all means this pandemic came from the left field and left us in a rather very perplexed situation.
It's very important to by all means reassure ourselves and reassure patients that by following the guidelines that are given by the experts and by the appropriate agencies we'll hopefully be safe.
That's the aim of it, the social distancing, the washing hands, the masks, and all the other details.
And within that context, we have to reassure our patients that, after all, this is a pandemic, we are very concerned. We are very concerned about our patients, specifically, especially as some of them are more prone to infections because of the reception of therapy, including chemotherapy.
But nonetheless, we have to reassure them that, after all, taking care of them and taking care of their illness is also an important priority for them and for us.
We do understand that there's this big surge of unfortunate death that we'll continue to see. This can translate into numbers and percentages that the media is not really short of providing us with. But sadly, patients still die from cancer. If anything, we have to tell our patients that they need the therapy they need, and if we elect not to give the therapy or we decide not to give the therapy, this has to be done on an individual basis.
Whenever we think it's appropriate and needed, by all means we should continue to give the therapy. You would be surprised, the same as happening with any of us, the patient would be always very appreciative that we're looking at their needs, as well, even though they are cognizant of the big pandemic we're living through.
An important point, also, that we are all being asked is, “Is there anything that we can do research-wise to understand better how do patients with cancer evolve with regard to COVID-19 if they were ever to get it? How can we prevent it? How can we treat it?”
All that I can say is that at Sloan Kettering, same like other institutions, we proudly are doing research, and we're doing clinical trials that apply specifically for patients with cancer with COVID-19, and I'm sure we're going to hear more about those as they evolve and open up.
