The Association Between COVID-19 and Invasive Pulmonary Aspergillosis: A Challenge for Health Care System

Abstract

The emerging disease of COVID-19 was announced as a pandemic in 2020, with wide prevalence worldwide. After the duration of the pandemic of the disease, reports based on the invasion of Aspergillus into patients' lungs with COVID-19 and their hospitalization in ICU were published by the researchers, which attracted the attention of other researchers to perform such studies. In this review, PubMed, ScienceDirect, Scopus, Springer, Wiley, ProQuest, Sid, Cochrane, and the search engine Google Scholar were searched for publications by the keywords include COVID-19, Aspergillus, SARS-CoV-2, Invasive pulmonary aspergillosis, fungal and viral co-infection or a combination of them. The data were extracted and descriptively discussed. Not many studies have been performed on the association between aspergillosis and COVID-19. However, although the results of the studies suggest some possible causes of these concomitant infections like underlying diseases and prolonged mechanical ventilation, they also recommend further studies. Since the diagnosis of common fungal and viral infections is difficult, the concurrent incidence of these two infections in patients becomes a therapeutic challenge. Accordingly, this issue increased the mortality rate in this group of patients, especially in those hospitalized in ICU. According to the recently performed studies, various problems, including underlying diseases and difficult diagnostic methods of some dangerous diseases like invasive aspergillosis, are discussed in patients with COVID-19.