Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), first reported in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, is caused by a novel coronavirus, termed severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and poses a huge global threat as a potentially fatal disease spreading worldwide. On March 11, 2020, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. On April 20, 2020, there were more than 2300000 patients with COVID-19, and its global death toll exceeds 160000. In Poland, there are more than 9000 infected patients and more than 360 deaths caused by COVID-19 were reported.

To address this pandemic, on March 23, 2020, Polish Archives of Internal Medicine (Pol Arch Intern Med) launched the fast-track peer review for submissions relating to COVID-19 to show various challenges of the diagnostic evaluation and treatment of this disease in Poland and other countries. This epidemic is like no other in the last decades. Science is our best weapon against COVID-19. We have to fight with this threat and win, therefore our journal must be involved in global scientific endeavors. Our primary aim was to facilitate spreading knowledge of COVID-19 among our readers and provide a platform for Polish clinicians dealing with this disease.

In this issue of our journal, we have published the first Polish cases of patients with COVID-19 pulmonary involvement and with an unusual course of SARS-CoV-2 infection, presented as Clinical Images. Also authors from other countries submitted their images to illustrate diagnostic problems while managing COVID-19. Apart from that, we have published a pooled analysis of early COVID-19 reports by Italian authors demonstrating that hypertension is associated with a substantial increase in the risk of both severe COVID-19 and related mortality. Of note, this issue of Pol Arch Intern Med contains 2 robust meta-analyses submitted by Canadian authors, who analyzed new therapeutic modalities in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome, ie, corticosteroids and interferon beta-1a; their findings have been suggested to be highly relevant also in patients with severe COVID-19 in intensive care units worldwide. These reports stimulated a keen interest in social media following the online publication. Finally, we have published concise and practical recommendations on the management of patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection, prepared by the Polish Association of Epidemiologists and Infectiologists.

Further articles on COVID-19 will appear in the May issue of our journal.

We still welcome various formats of manuscripts on COVID-19 and encourage all our readers to share their comments on the articles published in Pol Arch Intern Med.

We do hope that scientists will be able to effectively cure and prevent COVID-19 in the near future. This will not be possible without increasing knowledge on this disease among internists and physicians of other specialties and rapid publishing of relevant peer-reviewed clinical data worldwide. Our journal wishes to contribute to this task.