Being a Healthcare Professional in Dialysis During Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Fatal effect potentials of epidemics experienced one after another in the past 20 year such as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), MERS–CoV infection (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus) and Influenza have gradually increased the awareness of policy makers and the society. The COVID-19 pandemic, which started at the end of December 2019 and which is still continuing today, is defined as a phenomenon that is spread globally on a larger scale than all these epidemics (Tuncay, Koyuncu, & Özel, 2020). In terms of the emergence process of COVID-19 pandemic; the first signals of the outbreak started when Wuhan Municipal Health Committee announced new pneumonia cases of unknown causes on December 31, 2019. On January 12, 2020, the coronavirus newly discovered by the World Health Organization (WHO) was temporarily named “2019-nCoV”. This single-chain, positive-polar, enveloped RNA has been recognized as the seventh identified coronavirus (CoV) that can infect humans (Dikmen, Kına, Özkan, & İlhan; Jia Wang & Wang, 2020).