Dear Editor,
We are grateful for the interest in our study by Hu et al. and their comments improve the discussion on this important topic.
First, minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has been associated with an increased risk of surgical team contamination, however, it is not clear that MIS is associated with worse outcolatexlawlettermes in COVID‐19 positive patients as an independent factor. We reviewed our data regarding the surgical approach and found that only 24 (16.3%) had MIS—15 (15.3%) for the COVID‐negative group and 9 (18.4%) for the COVID‐positive group (p = .63). MIS was related to an increased risk of surgical complications grades ≥ 3 (open 4.9% and MIS 16.7%), however, unadjusted for other important factors such as surgical length, surgical complexity, and patient's comorbidities. In addition, the non‐MIS approach includes surgeries without entering abdominal and thoracic cavities.
Second, we agree that oncological surgery includes a wide range of procedures depending on the primary tumor and stage. Due to this complexity and a relatively low number of patients included in the study, we were not able to be discriminated and paired the oncological surgeries. We aimed to mitigate this weakness including oncological versus nononcological surgeries as a matching criterion. Finally, we have not widely implemented the ERAS program in our institution, yet.