The NYC hospital removes blood, enriches it with oxygen, and gives it back to Covid patients

Doctors in a Brooklyn hospital remove the blood from coronavirus patients from their bodies, flush it again with oxygen, and give it back to the patients in an experimental attempt to help people with respiratory equipment.

The procedure is known as ‘ECMO’ – extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.

As critically ill coronavirus patients pour into their hospitals, doctors have noticed a bizarre trend.

Even those who are not struggling to breathe and are not yet showing signs of oxygen deficiency have such low levels in their blood that a lab report would suggest they are already dead, Stat news reported.

Placing these patients on ventilators for extended periods of time can damage their already fragile lungs, and in New York City, 80 percent of ventilated patients die.

In an effort to alleviate these deadly problems, Dr. Paul Saunders and colleagues at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where more than 23,000 people have coronavirus, ECMO to deliver oxygen directly into the patient’s blood, according to Good morning America.

Coronavirus has a spike protein that attaches to lung cells, hijacking their machines to replicate themselves.

It usually enters the body through the nose or mouth and then travels through the airway to its target, deeper into the lungs.

There it damages the branches of the respiratory tree, a network of passageways, and then to the small sacs in the lungs responsible for gas exchange.

This triggers an immune response that rushes white blood cells to the site of the infection in an attempt to eliminate the viral invader.

But because the virus that causes COVID-19 is completely unknown to the immune system, it doesn’t have antibodies designed to fight it.

So the inflammation keeps pouring in, eventually building up in those air exchange sacs called alveoli, preventing them from absorbing oxygen to spread to the body and expel carbon dioxide.

At this stage, a patient has pneumonia, and if it persists, the lungs begin to fail.

Mechanical ventilation can breathe for them, but it’s not always enough to save a patient’s life, and the invasive supportive care itself can damage the lungs by forcing high-pressure air into the lungs and making it oversaturated with oxygen.

An analysis of ventilated patients in New York City found that at least 80 percent of them die. Already

Still, fans in general are the best hope for critically ill coronavirus patients, but they are scarce.

So doctors race to find alternatives or supplements.

At Maimonides they turn to ECMO.

ECMO works in the same way as heart and lung bypass machines used during open heart surgery and mechanically pumps blood and air to the patient as they undergo the procedure.

The machine used for ECMO removes blood from the body, uses an artificial lung to bring oxygen into starved red blood cells, and then pumps the rejuvenated blood back into their bodies, helping to prevent cell death in tissues without oxygen.

“In the current epidemic, it’s used as a last resort when fans aren’t enough,” Dr. Saunders, a cardiac surgeon at Maimonides Medical Center, at GMA.

Dr. Saunders contracted the corona virus himself, but survived and is now back at work at the ICU.

He said some patients in the ward are in their 30s and 40s.

“It is very difficult to predict who will become very ill and who will not,” said Dr. Saunders.

The hope is that the method can be a secondary tool for life-sustaining patients, helping to mitigate the damage ventilation can cause to their lungs and replenishing the short supply of fans.

New York City had a stock of about 3,500 fans when the corona virus began to spread in the metropolis, according to ProPublica.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said last week that he thought the city would run out of fans this weekend.

The crisis has been averted for the time being, but the threat of a fan shortage is far from over: more than 87,000 people in the city are infected with COVID-19. n