Oral Cancer Surgery and COVID 19 Pandemic: Our Experience

The COVID 19 pandemic limited the clinical practice of Surgical Oncologists all over the world to performing emergency procedures and surgeries. During this initial period of two to three weeks we realised that further delay in the treatment of curable oral cancers would have serious adverse prognostic implications. So we started the process to formulate our own institutional guidelines to screen and test all preoperative asymptomatic oral cancer patients for COVID 19. All preoperative oral cancer patients were tested for Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT PCR) and a negative COVID RT PCR report was followed by HRCT Chest. We share our prospectively collected data of Oral Cancer Surgery patients from 14th April to 31st May 2020 with details of sub site, stage, operative procedure and type of reconstruction offered. Our institutional protocol to test all preoperative patients by the highly sensitive HRCT Chest combined with the gold standard RT PCR assay ensured the safety of our patients, attendants and the hospital staff.