COVID-19 Infections among Minority Patients with Gastrointestinal Malignancies in Urban Safety Net Academic Medical Centers.

e15610 Background: COVID 19 infection has worse outcomes and is more severe among frail patients and with co-morbidities. Additionally, it was suggested by Mehta et al that gastrointestinal malignancies may have worse outcomes. Based off these findings, we have evaluated outcomes and potential predictors of these outcomes in patients with gastrointestinal malignancies and COVID 19 infection. Methods: We conducted a retrospective evaluation of 69 cases of patients between February 2020 to February 2021, that had both COVID 19 infection and a gastrointestinal malignancy, including: gastric, colon, pancreatic, biliary, and hepatic. We studied population general characteristics, most common tumors, oxygen requirements, management and death frequencies, at two urban safety net hospitals. Results: The median age of patients with gastrointestinal malignancies and COVID-19 infection was 68 (33 to 87), it was more frequently seen among males (N = 46, 67%); patients had on average 1-7 other comorbidities (N = 55, 80%), hypertension being the most common (N = 43, 62%). All patients in this study were minorities, the majority being Hispanics (N = 32, 46%), followed by African Americans (N = 21, 30%), the rest of patients were minorities such as Asians, Native Americans, and others (N = 16, 23%). We noted that more than half of patients were obese (N = 24, 35%), or overweight (N = 19, 28%), with a mean BMI of 26.24. Most patients were non-smokers (N = 39, 57%). The performance status among these patients was excellent in the large majority (ECOG 0-2; N = 62, 90%). The majority of malignant tumors were adenocarcinomas (N = 63, 91%); others included neuroendocrine tumors (N = 4, 6%) and gastrointestinal tumors (N = 2, 3%), the majority were advanced stage disease between stage III to stage IV disease (N = 38, 55%). The most common malignancy was colon cancer (N = 44, 64%), and also was the most reported deaths were among patients those patients with colon cancer (N = 13, 57%). Among patients that needed to be hospitalized (N = 43, 62%), needed some sort of oxygen supplementation (N = 36, 84%), a small number of patients required ICU admission (N = 8, 19%). When hospitalized, patients were mostly treated with hydroxychloroquine (N = 30, 70%) and steroids (N = 7, 16%). Inflammatory markers such as D-dimer, ferritin, C-RP were not reported in the majority of cases. Overall, the case fatality rate across all gastrointestinal malignancies was noted to be substantial (N = 22, 32%), 35% in males and 26% among females (p = 0.46). Conclusions: During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, patients with gastrointestinal malignancies who were infected, seemed to have a high chance to be admitted to the hospital (62%), once hospitalized the majority required some sort of oxygen supplementation (84%) and had a high case fatality rate from the COVID-19 infection (32%).