One Year Follow-ups of Patients Admitted to Spanish Intensive Care Units Due to COVID-19

The latest epidemiological data published from Chine reports that up to 30% of hospital-admitted patients required admission to intensive care units (ICU). The cause for ICU admission for most patients is very severe respiratory failure; 80% of the patients present with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (SARS) that requires protective mechanical ventilation. Five percent of patients with SARS require extracorporeal circulation (ECMO) techniques. Global mortality data has been thus far reported in different individual publications from China. Without accounting for those patients still admitted to hospital, bona fide information (from a hospital in Wuhan) received by the PI of this project estimates that mortality of hospitalized patients is more than 10%. Evidently, mortality is concentrated in patients admitted to the ICU and those patients who require mechanical ventilation and present with SARS. As data in China was globally reported, risk factors and prognosis of patients with and without SARS who require mechanical ventilation are not definitively known. The efficacy of different treatments administered empirically or based on small, observation studies is also not known. With many still admitted at the time of publication, a recent study in JAMA about 1500 patients admitted to the ICU in the region of Lombardy (Italy) reported a crude mortality rate of 25%. The data published until the current date is merely observational, prospective or retrospective. Data has not been recorded by analysis performed with artificial intelligence (machine learning) in order to report much more personalized results. Furthermore, as it concerns patients admitted to the ICU who survive, respiratory and cardiovascular consequences, as well as quality of living are completely unknown. The study further aims to investigate quality of life and different respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes at 6 months, as well as crude mortality within 1 year after discharge of patients