Bowel Perforation in Covid-19 Case Series.

OBJECTIVE To describe the clinical characteristics and outcomes of patients with coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19) who developed bowel perforation. MATERIALS AND METHODS This case series was conducted in Emergency Department of AORN Sant'Anna and S. Sebastiano located in Caserta. All patients resulted positive to SARS-Cov-2 in nasopharyngeal swabs whith a positive laboratory test for SARS-CoV-2 from real time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction(RT-PCR) as well as bowel perforation which was identified by abdominal CT, from September 2020 to December 2020. RESULTS A total of five patients were identified with Bowel perforation occurred despite all patients being on anticoagulation. All patients were Italian, predominantly male(four patients) with an average age of 60 years and the most common comorbidity was hypertension, diabetes and obesity. DISCUSSION Bowel perforation in COVID-19 is clinically significant with high morbidity and mortality. In our series 40% of patients who were diagnosed of bowel perforation died. Average time to death after bowel perforation diagnosis was 6 days. CONCLUSION We describe a case series of COVID-19 patients who developed bowel perforation. KEY WORDS Covid-19, Bowel perforation.