Impact of asymptomatic COVID-19 patients in global surgical practice during the COVID-19 pandemic

The rapid spread of COVID-19 has changed the global surgical care. Patients infected with COVID-19 may present without typical symptoms, and such asymptomatic patients may potentially trigger in-hospital outbreaks by transmitting the disease to health care providers and other hospitalized patients. Further, asymptomatic COVID-19 patients have worse postop- erative outcomes with an unexpectedly high morbidity and mortality, reaching 20⋅5 per cent deaths. However, we do not have objective global data on this issue. In an attempt to clarify the current global surgical practice under the COVID-19 pandemic particularly focusing on the preoperative screening of asymptomatic COVID-19 patients, we …