Introduction
Coronaviruses (CoV) are a large family of RNA viruses which can lead to various infections from self-limiting mild upper respiratory infections to serious life-threatening infections like Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).1-3 At December 2019, cases of pneumonia with unknown etiology were reported in Wuhan, Hubei province of China.4 At the beginning of the January 2020; the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) was isolated and World Health Organization (WHO) named this virus as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease resulting with pneumonia as Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19).2 Covid-19 spread rapidly from country to country and as a result WHO declared Covid-19 as a pandemic on the March 11th 2020.5 Worldwide total cases and the number of deaths reached 14.348.858 and 603.691, respectively.6 The first case in Turkey was reported at 11 March 2020 and the peak of daily cases and deaths were seen during the 4th week of the pandemic curve in our country.6
The workload of hospitals has increased considerably during the pandemic process and many healthcare measures were taken by governments and hospital systems. Most of the hospitals turned to pandemic or quarantine hospitals and had to serve only Covid-19 patients. Some detailed recommendations were published for the triage of urological surgeries during the Covid-19 pandemic.7-10 Like other surgical subspecialties; cancellation of elective surgeries and utilization of solely emergent surgeries and non-deferrable oncologic surgeries that delay may cause negative impact on survival have been performed in urology clinics according the triage recommendations.11 Also, urological outpatient clinics have been adapted to new social distancing rules in Covid-19 pandemic; the number of appointments was limited and only emergent patients could be treated in most of the urology clinics in worldwide as in our country.8,12,13
In this report, we aimed to present a nation-wide analysis of the workload of urology departments in Turkey week-by-week during Covid-19 pandemic and to compare the outcomes with the same time interval of the year 2019.