Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit hard all over. The current situation is still complex. We will need time to evaluate the impact and consequences in the years to come. The price to pay will be insurmountable. Many ongoing social, economic and organizational changes will be profound and possibly irreversible. It will not be for good. Responsibilities for this medical and humanitarian disaster have to be defined. In any case, those responsible at local, regional, national or international level will likely never, as expected, pay for this (1).
The history of the pandemic is known. It enhanced the response of the community in different ways. A simple literature search using the term “COVID-19” yields (July 25, 2020) 35,054 citations from December 31, 2019 when China reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) the first epidemic cluster of an unknown low respiratory infection in humans at Wuhan (2). This was never seen in medical literature (3). The reasons of why this happened must be discussed in the future.
Cardiovascular surgeons participated in the care of COVID-19 patients like many other professionals, reconverted in emergency room or intensive care physicians, being in the front line. The pandemic represented a major disruption in cardiac surgical programmes worldwide.
WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on January 30, 2020 raising to “very high” level on February 28. The new coronavirus, termed severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (4). The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was officially named in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) on 11 February 2020 (5). The first three cases in Europe were confirmed in France, on January 24, 2020 (6). Thirty-six additional cases were soon confirmed Lombardy, Italy (7).
A basic reproductive number (R0) for COVID-19 of around 2-3, estimates a high rate of spread in the early stages of the epidemic. A R0>1 indicates the likelihood of increasing infected numbers and that control measures are needed to limit the spread (8). Collaborative strategies were implemented worldwide with stress on strength surveillance and tracing to identify imported cases and avoid community transmission to reduce the disease burden and mitigate the devastating effects of the pandemic.