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.)