Introduction:
The World Health Organization declared the Coronavirus disease 2019
(COVID-19) outbreak as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. With its rapid
spread across the globe, physicians have encountered a broad spectrum of
early and late complications - mostly resulting from the underlying
inflammatory process - including acute respiratory distress syndrome
(ARDS), acute kidney injury (AKI), and secondary infection.
Mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients has been reported to be
as high as 17%, with the figure being 20.5% in patients undergoing
elective surgeries.
There is paucity of data regarding the cardiovascular effects of
COVID-19. Arrhythmias, myocarditis, hypercoagulability, congestive heart
failure, and, surprisingly, two cases of cardiac tamponade physiology,
both resulting from hemorrhagic pericardial effusion, have been
reported. We further report three cases of COVID-19 complicated by
cardiac tamponade requiring emergent surgical intervention.