As a counterpoint (anecdata...) to some comments here...
After contracting covid around Christmas and ~recovering over about 2 weeks, one of my younger sisters, 31 + pregnant, started feeling short of breath in late February. She went into the hospital, was held for observation/testing for a little over a day but was in good spirits.
Healthy. No major preexisting conditions before covid (aside from pregnancy and some allergies). No ~ground-glass anomaly (as I understand it).
She went into acute respiratory distress in the wee hours of the morning. Intubation helped get oxygen in, but C02 was building in her blood. Within 4 hours, they made the call to put her on ECMO. They needed to wheel her to another wing of the hospital and told her husband she might not even last that long. The chaplain followed them over.
Once there, they sprayed the walls and bed with her blood, and made her a cyborg for a week. And then we got her back.
(Well. Kinda. She was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia during this episode, and is having to live in the hospital until she delivers.)
She is, demographically, the kind of patient that merits interventions like this. As the news filtered to me several hundred miles away in spurts and haunting silences, I started my grieving when I heard she'd been intubated. ECMO was the only light in the tunnel.
(* I write this as a selfish brother with zero knowledge of the long term financial consequences to my sister and her young family.)
I'm really sorry that happened to your sister, but I'm also glad that's working out. Really, despite all of the pessimism about end-of-life decisions, ECMO is good technology and your sister's case is good evidence of that. I think what gets mixed up in all of this conversation is that what may be a good idea when you're less than 60 may not be a good idea when you're over 90.
As a side note, evidently, the French have really good medical technology and practice. They have been able to run ECMO in a Paris subway in order to save someone's life:
https://www.jems.com/patient-care/how-physicians-perform-pre...
I really do hope this kind of measure can be made more readily available. Till then, I'm still happy it works for people like your sister.
Best of luck to her and family. My heart goes out to you all.
Wow, that was hard to read. Was she vaccinated against Covid?
Out of curiosity, of what will the answer inform you?
If she was vaccinated, then COVID sounds like it could still be a big problem.
If not, then the current general impression of COVID largely being behind us (us being the vaccinated world) is still tenable.
Respiratory distress is a symptom of preeclampsia. Doesn't have to be related to COVID.
As I understand it, she wasn't diagnosed with preeclampsia (despite being a pregnant woman in a maternity hospital for shortness of breath--for ~36h) until after she was placed on ECMO. Her levels (I think maybe liver enzyme is what matters?) fell back into normal range within a few days of coming off ECMO, but they do not reverse the diagnosis once given.
“Vaccinated” is not really a Boolean. It is a list of N vaccine types and administration dates. After all, the protection fades over time, subject to many variables.
Relevance? The question still has a boolean answer (modulo booster), regardless of the menu of vaccine options.
Causality is never clear in individual cases. With millions of cases worldwide there will always be occasional outliers due to genetics or environmental factors or random luck. Severe COVID-19 symptoms have always been rare in that age group, and multiple large scale clinical trials have shown pretty conclusively that vaccination cuts the risk still further. But vaccines are never 100% effective, and individual anecdotes don't tell us anything useful about vaccine efficacy.
SARS-CoV-2 can never be eradicated and it will continue killing people just like other endemic respiratory viruses such as influenza, RSV, HCoV-OC43, etc. At this point the majority of Americans have already been infected so it's time to accept the risk and move on, regardless of how well the vaccines work.
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/26/1094817774/covid-19-infection...
She had an initial 2-shot course, but shied away from the booster after she found out she was pregnant (in late Oct, iirc.)