Predisposing factors of mycotic infections in COVID-19 patients

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic (COVID-19) has led to considerable hike in hospitalizations for pneumonia with multiorgan disease requiring immediate hospital care, maintenance of oxygen saturation level, and severe cases requiring mechanical ventilation. This opens the window of opportunity to microscopic organisms such as different species of fungus including Candida, Aspergillus, Rhizopus, and Cryptococcus adding other fungi causing opportunistic invasive fungal infections (OIFIs), and other bacteria to cause concurrent infections in COVID-19-diseased patients which on occasion not promptly diagnosed and are mostly diagnosed after death, which get chance due to invasive procedures such as intubation and immunosuppressant drugs which mostly consists of corticosteroids, patient with diabetes mellitus or any other chronic disease causing immunosuppression, patient having a history of chronic obstructive airway disease, development of antibiotic resistance, and vulnerability of pulmonary tissues regarding developing colony for mycotic infections. In this review, we talk over the character of mycotic concurrent infections in aggravation of COVID-19 disease severity and focus on arising trends associated with fungal infections in coronavirus-diseased (COVID-19 diseased) cases. In addition, this review impart the view on the risky component for concurrent mycotic infections in COVID-19 diseased patients who are hospitalized and focuses the possible task of extended immunemodulatory treatments in managing concurrent mycotic infections, comprising COVID-19-associated pulmonary aspergillosis, COVID-19-associated Candidiasis, and mucormycosis. This article restates the demand for prompt detection regarding presumed COVID-19-related systematic mycosis in the health-care settings which could empower fast OIFI diagnosis, treatment, and lowers the mortality rate.

Keywords

• aspergillosis
• candidiasis
• covid-19
• mucormycosis