Since 2019, COVID-19 has become the center of our personal and professional lives. Clinicians from all around the world had to recognize the novel form of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) related pulmonary and systemic diseases and its fast spreading rate.
Besides the outstanding effort towards the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19, lung diseases other than COVID-19 continued to occur, develop, and spread. During the pandemic, clinicians will be expected to adapt by incorporating COVID-19 into their routine clinical practices. Clinicians must critically review patients throughout the diagnostic workup without neglecting pulmonary diseases besides COVID-19, particularly in the absence of a confirmatory result.
This Research Topic is dedicated to the diseases that were possibly neglected or received delayed diagnosis due to their mimicry of COVID-19 in clinical symptoms, laboratory and radiological findings, as a result of a partially or completely common pathophysiological background.
It is fundamental to develop strategies to adopt pandemic circumstances in order to reduce the likelihood of a misdiagnosis.
In the process of returning the life before pandemic, we shall not forget that COVID-19 will remain as a possible diagnosis for a respectable amount of time. However, we need to be open-minded for other prevalent or idiopathic diseases, which existed before the pandemic; as well as stay conscious about when to exclude COVID-19. Clinicians should not fall for the misleading perception that stems from fighting a pandemic. At the meantime, it is expected from physicians to distinguish the systemic effects of the SARS-CoV-2 infection from other pathologies that act as comorbidities, and to intervene timely to achieve a response to treatment.
The aim of this Research Topic is to shed light on possible misconceptions that occurred and continue to occur during the COVID-19 pandemic. This Topic wants to collect the current state of lung diseases other than COVID-19, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the chest diseases clinic. We welcome original research, brief reports, case reports, perspective articles, mini-reviews, and systematic reviews that assess the effects and outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic on the area of lung diseases around the world.
Welcome topics include but are not limited to:
• Diseases that were potentially misdiagnosed and treated as COVID-19
• Strategies to differentiate COVID-19 from accompanying diseases
• The management of concurrent COVID-19 and co-morbid diseases
• Acute exacerbation of interstitial lung diseases that were misdiagnosed as COVID-19
• Management of delayed diagnosis of lung diseases
• Targeted management strategies to reduce the diagnostic errors during the pandemic
• Analysis of challenges during COVID-19 pandemic
• Implications of a current pandemic for public health agenda
For this Research Topic, Dr.
Pinar Yildiz Gulhan has been recognized as a Research Topic Coordinator for their crucial role in assembling this project.