COVID-19 ECMO Myths Busted

ABSTRACT

Literature has proven that COVID-19 patients develop pneumonia. Prognosis of this is poor in case of COVID-19 patients developing the following low lymphocyte count (< 16%) which gets lower with active COVID-19 infection, sedentary lifestyle, obesity, and uncontrolled diabetes mellitus with no exercise. A lot of dilemmas and myths in this nascent COVID-19 pandemic period exist regarding the use of ECMO. Perplexities such as do we treat the COVID-19 patients on ECMO, as a pulmonary ARDS pneumonia, and/or do we need high PEEP or moderate PEEP, during ECMO for this ARDS;are some common COVID-19 ECMO myths which this short review aims to cover in a question-answer format.