COPD at the Time of COVID-19: A COPD Foundation Perspective
Ruth Tal‐Singer, James D. Crapo
Abstract
Nearly 16 million Americans, and more than 250 million people around the world, live with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and millions more remain undiagnosed. The COPD Foundation has been monitoring the global pandemic of a disease caused by the recently identified coronavirus family member SARS-CoV-2 named coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). On April 17th, 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) reported 2,078,605 confirmed cases and 139,515 deaths globally. 1 The COVID-19 pandemic has put patients with COPD and other comorbidities at a high risk for poor outcomes as noted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 2 Although there is limited published data on COVID-19 in COPD individuals (only 15 out of > 4815 PubMed references on April 17th), a recent article in the European Respiratory Journal evaluated 1590 laboratory-confirmed hospitalized cases in China