Abstract
AimAs a follow-up to the international survey conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in April 2020, this survey aims to provide a situational snapshot of the COVID-19 impact on nuclear medicine services worldwide, 1 year later. The survey was designed to determine the impact of the pandemic at two specific time points: June and October 2020, and compare them to the previously collected data.Materials and methodsA web-based questionnaire, in the same format as the April 2020 survey was disseminated to nuclear medicine facilities worldwide. Survey data was collected using a secure software platform hosted by the IAEA; it was made available for 6 weeks, from November 23 to December 31, 2020.ResultsFrom 505 replies received from 96 countries, data was extracted from 355 questionnaires (of which 338 were fully completed). The responses came from centres across varying regions of the world and with heterogeneous income distributions. Regional differences and challenges across the world were identified and analysed. Globally, the volume of nuclear medicine procedures decreased by 73.3% in June 2020 and 56.9% in October 2020. Among the nuclear medicine procedures, oncological PET studies showed less of a decline in utilization compared to conventional nuclear medicine, particularly nuclear cardiology. The negative impact was also significantly less pronounced in high-income countries. A trend towards a gradual return to the pre-COVID-19 situation of the supply chains of radioisotopes, generators, and other essential materials was evident.ConclusionThe year 2020 has a significant decrease in nuclear medicine diagnostic and therapeutic procedures as a result of the pandemic-related challenges. In June, the global decline recorded in the survey was greater than in October when the situation began to show improvement. However, the total number of procedures remained below those recorded in April 2020 and fell to less than half of the volumes normally carried out pre-pandemic.
Highlights
In December 2019, a new type of coronavirus, 2019-nCoV/ SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), was extracted and identified from1 3 Vol.:(0123456789)European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging samples of the lower respiratory tract of patients with atypical pneumonia in Wuhan, China [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The volume of nuclear medicine procedures decreased by 73.3% in June 2020 and 56.9% in October 2020, compared to the average number of procedures performed before the COVID-19 pandemic
The reductions affected conventional nuclear medicine by 73.9% and 57.5% in June and October respectively (54% in April 2020), PET by 65.6% and 40.3% (36% in April 2020) and radionuclide therapies by 69.0% and 48.2% (46% in April 2020). The results of this survey showed a greater decline in all the nuclear medicine procedures when compared to the data reported by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in a survey conducted in April 2020 [13] (Fig. 2)
Summary
In December 2019, a new type of coronavirus, 2019-nCoV/ SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), was extracted and identified from1 3 Vol.:(0123456789)European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging samples of the lower respiratory tract of patients with atypical pneumonia in Wuhan, China [1,2,3,4,5,6]. In December 2019, a new type of coronavirus, 2019-nCoV/ SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), was extracted and identified from. People with COVID19 exhibited a wide range of symptoms, ranging from mild ones including fever, fatigue, dry cough and headache to serious illness with pneumonia, respiratory distress, multiple organ failure, thrombotic accidents and death. COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020 and has since presented the world with unparalleled medical, scientific, social, economic and ethical challenges. The WHO dashboard indicates over 140 million confirmed cases of COVID19, including over 3 million deaths [7]. Several countries have begun rolling out targeted vaccination efforts and new COVID variants have been identified [1,2,3, 7]
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