A commentary on “Impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on scientific research and implications for clinical academic training – A review”

We read with great interest the article published in your prestigious journal by Sohrabi et al. [1], wherein the authors carried out a comprehensive review with the aim of providing a critical evaluation of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientific research and funding, as well as academic clinical and surgical training.

In December 2019, in Wuhan, Hubei, People's Republic of China, health officials identified an increasing number of pneumonia cases caused via a new coronavirus (later known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 [SARS-CoV-2]). The relevant respiratory tract infections were named officially as COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO) [2]. Over the next few months, COVID-19 began to spread around the world, and then gradually developed into a full-blown pandemic; so far, more than 100 million people have been diagnosed with infection, and more than 2 million people have died of the disease. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the world has been plunged into an unprecedented public health crisis. With the goal of controlling the spread of virus, an emergency program was put in place, thereby restricting all unnecessary public activities.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has latent negative implications for the management of clinical trials, which has raised concerns about the safety of patients and may compromise the integrity of scientific data. In addition, due to the limited research opportunities for interventions or new therapies and experimental activities for a variety of diseases, especially those affecting vulnerable groups, the development of trials is now subject to unprecedented operational burdens. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to many public health policies that have weakened the health care systems in many countries. This situation greatly affects nursing providers, research participants, trial sponsors, and researchers, as well as the research institutions involved in clinical trials. Researchers are also concerned about the financial implication for the human resources and research institutions of canceling or delaying clinical trials. According to one survey, approximately two-thirds of respondents are about to stop or have stopped the registration of subjects in the ongoing clinical experiments; one-third of the respondents have stopped randomized grouping; and 50% of the respondents plan to postpone or are delaying the researches [3]. As a result, in implementing the clinical trials, these challenges must be overcome by utilizing proactive, dynamic strategies and a solid risk-evaluation and decision-making framework.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed new challenges to the global research community. With the help of academic research, there is a need for a better understanding of the COVID-19 and its socio-economic ramifications on society. The future research will be multi-disciplinary and trans-national, promoting a new wave of research in the biological and the medical sciences for the well-being of civilization.

Provenance and peer review

Commentary, internally reviewed

International journal of surgery author disclosure form

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Please state any sources of funding for your research.

Author contribution

Please specify the contribution of each author to the paper, e.g. study design, data collections, data analysis, writing. Others, who have contributed in other ways should be listed as contributors.

Xing Chen: design and write.

Xiaoxia Chen: review and edit.

Guarantor

The Guarantor is the one or more people who accept full responsibility for the work and/or the conduct of the study, had access to the data, and controlled the decision to publish.

Xiaoxia Chen.

Declaration of competing interest

None.