Screening of thoracic surgical patients was mainly conducted with a nasopharyngeal swab and was complemented by CT scanning in one-third of the cases. Single-swab testing might be considered a concern because the false negative rate in symptomatic patients is ∼20% but can rise to 100% in asymptomatic patients [8]. There was also a wide variety in levels of testing. This result, of course, may reflect national governmental policy and is largely dependent on the test capacity per country/region (ranging from 453 to 32 414 tests per million inhabitants for countries represented in this survey) [9]. Surgery for patients whose test results were positive for the virus would almost always be postponed for at least 2 weeks, which is based on viral load modelling [10].