Patients awaiting surgery for various causes should be vaccinated for coronavirus priority over the general population in order to reduce their post-operative risk of death, according to new international scientific research.
0.6% to 1.6% of patients (i.e., approximately one in 100) experience Covid-19 infection after planned surgery. Those patients who get coronavirus after surgery have a four- to eightfold increased risk of death within 30 days of surgery. For example, patients over 70 years of age undergoing cancer tumour removal surgery have an average mortality of 2.8%, which increases to 18.6% (almost one in five) if they become infected with coronavirus.
Scientists estimate that the timely vaccination of surgical patients can prevent many deaths, especially in older people. According to their estimate, if worldwide priority is given to pre-operative vaccination for Covid-19, nearly 59,000 more lives would be saved in one year.
Researchers from the international surgical consortium COVIDSurg, led by Dr. Anil Bangu of the University of Birmingham, UK, who published the paper in the British Journal of Surgery (BJS), analysed data on 141,582 patients from 1,667 hospitals in 116 countries.
«Preoperative vaccination can support a safe resumption of scheduled surgery, significantly reducing the risk of Covid-19 complications in patients and preventing tens of thousands of Covid-19-related post-operative deaths,» Bangu said.
During the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, up to 70% of planned surgeries were postponed, internationally, leading to the delay or postponement of approximately 28 million surgeries, internationally. Although surgeries have begun to recover in numbers, in several countries, the problem of delays is expected to continue throughout 2021, particularly in countries experiencing the next waves of the pandemic most severely.
