Global Effort to Collect Data on Ventilated Patients With COVID-19

As the new chair of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO), John Fraser, MBChB, PhD, began talking with the group’s members last November about why influenza affects some people worse than others, so much so that they require extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). Maybe 10 people, representing a minority of the chapter’s 46 member institutions, said they were interested in exploring that question, Fraser recalled a few months later.

Then, in early January, an ELSO member from China mentioned that “this thing’s happening in Wuhan,” said Fraser, an intensivist and anesthesiologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. “’Let’s have a look-and-see, a nice little study,’ is what I said,” he recalled. “Shows how stupid I am.”

More like how prescient he was. Over a weekend in January, Fraser and some fellow ELSO members wrote the protocol for a database to collect information about “this thing” in Wuhan, which quickly became a thing in South Korea as well.

They called their study ECMOCARD, short for Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation for novel Coronavirus Acute Respiratory Disease. But as the disease spread far beyond China and South Korea, Fraser and his colleagues recognized that only a small percentage of affected patients were being placed on ECMO. So the researchers expanded their focus to all patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) who were on a ventilator.