Coronavirus

Eine beunruhigende Mail aus China… - Seite 2

Prof. Zhong Nanshan, Anti-SARS hero in 2003 and member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and his team published a paper that examined 1,099 patients with new coronary pneumonia. The mean incubation period was 4 days, the majority were 2-7 days and the longest could be up to 24 days.

2. Patients with new Coronavirus pneumonia often do not have a dangerous start in the early stages, but suddenly accelerate in the later stages, trigger an “inflammatory storm” in the body and enter into a state of failure of several organs, Zhong Ming said to Media. He is deputy director of the intensive care unit at Fudan University's Zhongshan Hospital, and the first expert went from Shanghai to assist Hubei Province.

From February 16 to 24, the Huazhong University of Science and Technology's pathology team, led by Liu Liang and Professor Wang Guoping from the Pathology Department of the affiliated Tongji Hospital, performed an autopsy of 9 cases. The research team pointed out that The lungs of the deceased were obvious, and the macroscopic view of the lungs was patchy. Gray-white lesions and dark red bleeding were seen. A large number of sticky secretions overflowed from the alveolar section. It suggested that the new coronavirus mainly causes inflammatory reactions characterized by deep airway and alveolar damage. In addition, some front-line doctors have reported that the virus can also seriously hurt patients' hearts. But this is all under further study.

3. The cost of treating critically ill patients with new coronavirus virus is very high
Lu Hongzhou, director of the Shanghai Public Health Center, said that the critically ill patients with new Coronavirus virus had to use the ventilator and ECMO. According to his experience, ECMO has a higher success rate among adolescents and younger children with better organ function. The senior patients, who more complications have, the lower the success rate for them would be. In the past, there was no ECMO at SARS time.
ECMO (Extra-corporeal membrane Oxygenation) plays a role to provide the human body with an "artificial heart and an artificial lung" in vitro in order to gain valuable time for the treatment of the other diseases of critically ill patients.

At the same time, the cost of using ECMO in China was extremely high. In general, the costs for starting this machine in China are 5,000 euros and the daily usage fee is around 1,200 euros, because the ECMO device itself is very expensive. One device often costs more than 150,000 euros and the purchase of other disposable items is even larger. According to statistics, the average price of 74 ECMO devices, which were bought by some Chinese hospitals from 2010 to 2020, at least 100,000 euros and at most 450,000 euros. However, the Chinese government has decided to waive all medical costs for all patients with the new coronavirus. Some other developing countries may not be able to fully cover such huge costs for each patient.