Survival After In-Hospital Cardiac Arrest In Critically Ill Patients: Implications For Covid-19 Outbreak?

Girotra, Saket; Tang, Yuanyuan; Chan, Paul S; Nallamothu, Brahmajee K

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak is placing a considerable strain on U.S. healthcare systems by requiring both significant acute resources and endangering healthcare team members through airborne infection. Many U.S. healthcare systems are now considering how to treat COVID-19 patients who suffer cardiac arrest based on a presumption of poor survival after resuscitation in COVID-19 patients. However, empiric data on cardiac arrest survival in COVID-19 from the United States are not available at the moment. To inform this debate, we report survival data following cardiopulmonary resuscitation in a cohort of critically ill patients with pneumonia or sepsis who were receiving mechanical ventilation in an intensive care unit (ICU) at the time of arrest.