Endoscopy during the Covid-19 outbreak: experience and recommendations from a single center in a high-incidence scenario

A dramatic SARS-Cov-2 outbreak is hitting Italy hard. To face the new scenario all the hospitals have been re-organised in order to reduce all the outpatient services and to devote almost all their personnel and resources to the management of Covid-19 patients. As a matter of fact, all the services have undergone a deep re-organization guided by: the necessity to reduce exams, to create an environment that helps reduce the virus spread, and to preserve the medical personnel from infection. In these days a re-organization of the endoscopic unit, sited in a high-incidence area, has been adopted, with changes to logistics, work organization and patients selection. With the present manuscript, we want to support gastroenterologists and endoscopists in the organization of a new endoscopy unit that responds to the new scenario, while remaining fully aware that resources, availability and local circumstances may extremely vary from unit to unit. (C) 2020 Editrice Gastroenterologica Italiana S.r.l. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.