Estimating the Risks from COVID-19 Infection in Adult Chemotherapy Patients

Matt Williams; Kerlann Le Calvez; Ella Mi; Jiarong Chen; Seema Dadhania; Lillie Pakzad-Shahabi

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . Figure 2 . Scenarios exploring absolute survival benefit and potential risks in a variety of common chemotherapy settings [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] cancer, or receiving chemotherapy is of secondary importance. If it is due to having cancer, then we would suggest that receiving chemotherapy would simple increase in further. We would stress that any additional risk from administering chemotherapy is likely to be a multiplier on the risks seen here; thus small relative risks may translate to large changes in absolute risk for some patients. We have also assumed that both harm and benefits accrue over the same time period, whereas in reality, most improvements in cancer survival with chemotherapy are calculated at 2 and 5 years. For patients undergoing palliative chemotherapy, it is probably more reasonable to assume that the risks and harms accrue over a similar time period; for those having adjuvant treatment, where chemotherapy increases the chance of cure, the benefits may accrue over a much longer time period. In this sense, treatment is more valuable (in that it leads to more years of life) but harm from treatment also weighs more heavily.