Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation Support in a Young Patient With COVID-19 Infection

Critically ill patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection often require mechanical ventilation, and still many of them will progress to worsening hypoxia and death. Veno-venous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VV-ECMO) has been used in some centers, but its role in the setting of COVID-19 infection is still unclear to date. We describe a case of a young female patient with obesity but otherwise no other underlying medical conditions who was admitted with respiratory failure secondary to COVID-19. Given her severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) with refractory hypoxemia, she was treated with VV-ECMO. After a prolonged hospital course, she improved clinically and was able to have VV-ECMO explanted, after 18 days of extracorporeal therapy. The complexity of ECMO therapy requires a well-trained multidisciplinary team present only at expert centers. The high resource cost is a challenge to the health care system in times of a global pandemic. Considering the limitations of this resource-intensive therapy, clinical judgment is crucial to decide whether ECMO is an appropriate option for the patient. However, for young patients with no underlying conditions who are critically ill despite optimized mechanical ventilation, we believe that extracorporeal therapy represents a reasonable option when available.