COVID-19 and lung Cancer? 

Compared with the general population, people with lung cancer are at higher risk of developing more serious COVID-19 illness. As a group, they are older and have poorer overall health, and many are taking medications that suppress the immune system. Many chemotherapy medications and targeted therapies for lung cancer can cause neutropenia, or depletion of immune system white blood cells that fight infection.

When you look at who’s been most profoundly ill, it tends to be people who are older, in their 60s, 70s and 80s, as you get older, your immune system doesn’t function as well. In cancer patients on chemotherapy, people with solid organ transplants or bone marrow transplants and those who use high-dose steroids for autoimmune diseases, the risk will likely be more severe. They may shed the virus for longer. They may be more likely to develop pneumonia and more likely to die. We don’t know until we have more information, but many of us have concerns about that.

People with a weakened immune system may be unable to fight off the virus, or they may develop an abnormal excessive immune response known as a cytokine storm. Paradoxically, immune suppression can sometimes mean milder early symptoms, such as fever, even as the virus and the body’s response to it ravage the lungs.

With other respiratory viruses, immune-suppressed patients often don’t present with the classical symptoms. The symptoms may be more subtle, so we have to have more awareness. Oftentimes their initial symptoms may be less prominent, but the level of complex disease may be more severe.