Bernard Ross explains how a medical device has been providing life threatening blood clot prevention for hospitalised patients with COVID-19 and discusses the emerging data that now suggests the virus is an endothelial disease.
The first confirmed case of COVID-19 was recorded in the UK on 31 January. Since then, more than 42,000 people have lost their lives and more than 295,000 infections have been confirmed in the UK. Significantly, the number of clotting problems related to COVID-19 is unprecedented and eight months in, from the first reported case in China, UK ICU clinicians and leading epidemiologists are coming to the conclusion that COVID-19 isn’t just a respiratory illness, but, instead, something that can ultimately evolve into a vascular illness that affects the endothelium.
Initial data
As early as January, studies from China confirmed what many ICU teams across the UK and globally were fast seeing, that hospitalised patients with COVID-19 were presenting with a high blood clot risk and a high bleed risk – an incidence rate of over 60% in immobile critically ill COVID-19 patients. Collectively, the studies called for improved blood clot prevention strategies and stressed the importance of individual patient bleed risk assessment, prior to prescribing high-dose blood thinners, which can worsen bleed risk.
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