From Editor-in-Chief: Has everything changed during pandemic: peer-review, science, clinical practices and education, CV diseases?

One of our esteemed reviewers mentioned: ``Pandemics has changed everything``.

When preparing editorial for this issue we wanted to share the experience with peer-review of articles during pandemics, how it has impacted our policies and also we hoped that major steps against pandemics would be taken and we will be writing more on our usual topics in scope of the journal aim. However, according to forecasting report, the pandemic is projected to be defeated only in 2 years. Therefore, we are going not only reflect the changes in journal’s work and its policies in frame of pandemics, but briefly update where we are now from evidence-based point of view in war against pandemics, long-term effects of the COVID-19 on cardiovascular system and how it impacted our professional life as specialists, and medical education as well.

As many journals acknowledged, there is an increase in number of submissions regardless of hot topic papers on COVID-19 (1, 2). However, the peer-review process underwent changes as many of authors and reviewers work on frontlines, and evidence emerges daily, leading to  change in editorial evaluation (3, 4). Almost all articles on COVID-19 are freely accessible on websites of journals, publishers and professional societies, so many can freely read and discuss the results on many platforms. It is an unprecedented scientific crowdsourcing, which actually helps better understanding, evaluating current knowledge (retracted manuscripts) and define directions what should be done next.  There may be a place for speculation that multidisciplinary crowdsourcing and approach in care also helped to prevent many deaths.

We as journal have prolonged duration of review by editors, referees and revision by authors, who work on frontline of pandemics. We are grateful to all our reviewers and editors for their excellent reviews and authors for revisions of manuscripts they made during this busy and difficult time. As Editors, we are committed to prompt evaluation of articles on emergent topic as COVID-19.

In this time of pandemics, Editors also made call to the politicians for change in policies and  commitment to solve healthcare inequalities, improve public health, global health and medical research support (5), which deserves applaud and should be addressed in many countries as well.

So far, according to current evidence, in fight against COVID-19 we have in armamentarium remdesevir (6) and dexamethasone for patients on oxygen support and mechanical ventilation (7). There are negative results for tocilizumab (8), however the observational study revealed 36% reduction in  mortality outcomes for patients with increased inflammatory markers generating now hypothesis to be tested in RCT (9). There are ongoing debates on use of convalescent plasma  for patients with COVID-19 (10), and progress has been done for respiratory care, and multiorgan failure support, there is now an emerging knowledge on vaccines.