Delivering urgent urological surgery during the COVID‐19 pandemic in the United Kingdom: Outcomes from our initial 52 patients.

Paramore, Louise; Yang, Bob; Abdelmotagly, Yehia; Noureldin, Mohamed; McLean, Duncan; Rajkumar, Govindaraj; Adamson, Andrew; Emara, Amr; White, Christopher; Hindley, Richard; Nedas, Timothy

Since first reported in December 2019, the novel RNA betacoronavirus disease (COVID‐19) has spread rapidly across the world with, as of the 3rd May 2020, 3.3 million confirmed cases with more than 230,000 deaths worldwide and more than 200 countries affected. The most common symptoms reported include dry cough, fever and fatigue with ground‐glass opacification bilaterally in the lungs on imaging and lymphopenia on haematological analysis. In severe cases the patients can develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) or multi organ failure which can lead to death. Transmission of the virus (SARS‐CoV‐2) is via direct contact or via droplets spread by a cough or sneeze from an infected individual. The difficulty in disease detection and containment has been the long course of COVID‐19. Current evidence shows an incubation period of up to 14 days post exposure to the virus, and on average most patients first display symptoms on day five after initial exposure. More importantly, carriers are contagious even during this preceding asymptomatic incubation phase of the disease.