Successful prevention and screening strategies for COVID-19: focused on patients with hematologic diseases

ABSTRACT

Hematologic patients are immunocompromised, particularly susceptible to life-threatening viral infections (Cho, et al 2018). Regarding the world-wide outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), the first case was diagnosed in Korea on January 20, 2020 (Kim, et al 2020, Wang, et al 2020). With spreading of COVID-19, the number of new COVID-19 cases had increased exponentially with peak of 909 new infections on February 29 in Korea (Korean Society of Infectious Diseases, et al 2020). The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 pandemic on March 11, and as of May 6, 2020, more than 3.5 million cases have been confirmed around the world.