Speaking from his hospital bed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, James Perkinson’s voice was raspy. In February, he’d just been taken off ECMO, the last-ditch life support treatment in which a machine outside the body does the work of the heart and lungs.
About 50% of the COVID-19 patients who received ECMO died. Researchers wanted to know what happened to the patients turned away because ECMO machines and the specialized staffers needed were in short supply.
For COVID patients, ECMO is a last-ditch respiratory treatment in which only about half survive. Yet a new small study suggests many lives would still have been saved if there had been more machines.