Chinese coronavirus patient recovers after more than 100 days on controversial life support machine

Name: World’s first coronavirus reinfection case confirmed in Hong Kong, a university study reports
Uploaded: 2020-08-31T04:00:10.000Z
Duration: 3 min 49 s
Description: World’s first coronavirus reinfection case confirmed in Hong Kong, a university study reports

The patient from Guangzhou spent almost twice as long hooked up to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine as other survivors

Some critics have questioned the ethics of using the treatment because of the cost and high death rates

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A Covid-19 patient is treated using the controversial life support system in a Chinese hospital. Photo: AFP

Stephen Chen

Published: 12:00pm, 31 Aug 2020Updated: 10:56pm, 31 Aug 2020

A coronavirus patient from China has left hospital after the longest-ever stay on a controversial life support machine, according to media reports.

The 62-year-old man spent 111 days on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine, almost twice as long as previous patients. He was discharged from a hospital in Guangzhou last week, according to state news agency Xinhua.

The treatment was pioneered in the 1970s to treat babies in intensive care, but its use on adults has proved controversial, both because of the cost and concerns that it prolonged the suffering of patients who eventually died.

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World’s first coronavirus reinfection case confirmed in Hong Kong, a university study reports

Leading government infectious disease expert Professor Zhong Nanshan did not give a cost for the treatment, which will be funded entirely by taxpayers, but he told People’s Daily that it was an example of “saving people‘s lives without considering the cost”, a quote from President Xi Jinping.

The patient, who was seriously obese, was admitted to hospital in early February with breathing difficulties and was showing signs of heart failure.

The ECMO machine functions as an artificial lung and heart and drains blood out of the body, enriches it with oxygen and pumps it back. After being originally used to keep babies on life support it has been increasingly used worldwide to keep seriously ill adults alive.

But Covid-19 makes it particularly hard to treat patients because serious inflammations increase the risk of uncontrollable bleeding, which cannot be treated with drugs because of the risk of clotting the ECMO’s oxygen exchange membrane.

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