Maintaining Hemostasis and Preventing Thrombosis in Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)-Part I.

Abstract

Welcome to another issue of Seminars in Thrombosis and Hemostasis (STH). This issue is published under the “banner” of “Maintaining Hemostasis and Preventing Thrombosis in Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19),” this being the first such issue (or “Part I”). COVID-19 is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Believed to originate from Wuhan City in China, with the first reported case in December 2019, at the time of writing, there were over 26 million cases reported worldwide, and nearly 900,000 attributable deaths.[1] From a smattering of reports in the scientific literature in late 2019 (n = 228), there is now over 51,000 publications ascribed to COVID-19 in PubMed, including over 5,000 reviews. Given this enormous explosion of information, it is virtually impossible to keep up with the literature on COVID-19. Also given this plethora of information, one wonders if there is much point adding yet more information into the pile? Once COVID-19 exploded into our collective minds, the editorial team of STH gave serious thought to this question. One situation that was clear to us was that given the great interest and initial thirst for knowledge, all journals became interested in publishing on COVID-19 and, indeed, some articles have been fast tracked to publication that have since been retracted, even by high impact factor journals. The STH board decided that, yes, STH needed to publish on COVID-19, but no, we did not want to publish just anything on COVID-19, and so we actually took a fairly resistant stance initially to acceptance of COVID-19 articles, just because they mentioned COVID-19. Primarily, STH did not want to publish misinformation, or additional “me too” articles (e.g., reviews similar to those that had already been published elsewhere). It was felt that we have a smart Editorial Board. The Board has kept abreast of the literature, even for COVID-19, despite that being a tough task. Hence, our initial approach to COVID-19, as noted in this issue of STH, was to canvass from the STH Editorial Board, a series of commentaries around various aspects of COVID-19, although given the journal scope, obviously related primarily to thrombosis and hemostasis. The guest editors of this issue series also started the ball rolling for STH by preparing a commentary that we published some time ago, on laboratory tests that might be recommended for routine assessment of COVID-19 patients,[2] and which we could then use as a kind of template to guide further commentaries. We wanted these contributions to reflect a range of topics, but be of high quality. We also needed to name the issue series. We knew early on, and this became then absolutely clear from postmortem studies that despite the disease manifesting initially as a respiratory disease, thrombosis is a hallmark of most (if not all) severe/critical COVID-19 cases. Hence, the issue name “Maintaining Hemostasis and Preventing Thrombosis in Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)” was coined, which we hope will become a kind of mantra to us all.