Biosafety procedures for handling intraoperative surgical samples during COVID-19 pandemic: An Italian pathology laboratory experience

Abstract

Up to now, Italy is one of the European centers with the most active Coronavirus cases with 233,836 positive cases and 33,601 total deaths as of June 3rd. During this pandemic and dramatic emergency, Italian hospitals had also to face neoplastic pathologies, that still afflict the Italian population, requiring urgent surgical and oncological treatment. In our Cancer Center Hospital, the high volume of surgical procedures have demanded an equally high volume of intraoperative pathological examinations, but also posed an additional major challenge for the safety of the staff involved. The current commentary reports our experience in the past two months (since March 9th) for a total of 1271 frozen exams from 893 suspect COVID-19 patients (31 confirmed).