Thomas Bice, MD, MSc, assistant professor of medicine in the division of pulmonary diseases and critical care medicine, discusses the use of ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic and their lasting effects on patients which can lead to post-intensive care syndrome.
“There are two groups of patients who end up with mechanical ventilation. The majority are on a ventilator for an average of four or five days,” says Bice in a new UNC Health article. “The second group is people who require it for 10 to 14 days or more.”
The article recognizes that the second group of patients often have severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which occurs when fluid builds up in the lungs and prevents them from filling with enough air. Breathing becomes difficult and oxygen cannot get to vital organs.
People with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) who end up in the hospital ICU often fall into this second category. “Those patients tend to have a longer course of mechanical ventilation,” Bice says. “So this is a disease that seems to take a longer time to recover from.”
Read the article here.