COVID-19 and Cancer: Oncologist Shares His View

Aditya Bardia, MD, MPH, attending physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, discusses COVID-19 (Coronavirus) risk in patients with cancer and the elderly.

Transcription

We don't have the answers yet in terms of how COVID-19 will impact immunocompromised patients. We do know from what was seen in China that elderly patients were the ones who were at higher risk of having a more serious infection. One can anticipate that immunocompromised patients might also have a more severe form of infection.

Having said that, there's a lot of development that's going on in terms of developing assays to detect this disease earlier. And [there's] also a lot of work being done on vaccines. So there's a lot of work being done which could change the natural history of this disease.