The worldwide total death toll due to COVID is rapidly approaching 6 million souls, according to data provided by worldometers.info. The medical world has managed to come up with efficient methods of fighting against the disease, but new ways of overcoming the coronavirus are always welcomed.
If you haven’t heard about extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (aka ECMO), we hope you won’t learn about it the hard way. It’s the name of an advanced form of life support that can be used in the case of those COVID patients who get very sick. CNN now writes about the study of researchers from Vanderbilt University showing that ECMO can cut the death risk for such patients by 50%. But using ECMO may be more complicated than it should be.
Many COVID patients could have been saved
When there’s not enough skilled staff, and also not enough beds and machines, there’s a problem for COVID patients. The new study also brings the terrible information that these factors stopped many patients to benefit from the ECMO treatment.
ECMO works by circulating and oxygenating the blood by using tubes and pumps. This allows the lungs and heart to recover, meaning organs that are affected by COVID during severe illness.
Whitney Gannon, the lead study researcher, declared as quoted by CNN:
I think this is very powerful to me, because, you know, for the first time, we were actually seeing what is happening to these patients, when they don’t receive this therapy.
Unfortunately, COVID symptoms are numerous and not easy to eliminate. Maintaining cautious behavior in the fight with the pandemic is a great option.
