"Review of Barotrauma in Admitted Covid-19 Cases - A Single Center Retrospective Study From March 2020 Till April 2021."

Introduction

Covid-19 is a recently emerged disease affecting the respiratory system primarily but later on, progresses to multisystem involvement. Most of the cases are mild and self-remitting. However, those who develop moderate to severe symptoms require admission. They receive different modalities of respiratory support as per the international guidelines.

The covid-19 typically starts with mild respiratory symptoms with fever, headache, and myalgia. Most of the cases remit after these by 10 days, but around 15% progress to more severe symptoms such as worsening of fever, respiratory symptoms leading to hypoxemia proceeding to complications further on. Correspondingly, the radiological findings peak by 2 weeks after symptom onset. By this point in time, the patients start requiring respiratory support and complications start to emerge as the time passes. Bacterial superinfections, interleukin surge, septic shock are commonly encountered. Recently, at our center rising episodes of barotrauma have been observed.

In the covid era because of huge numbers of admissions, the hospital, as well as ICU beds with respiratory and monitoring resources, are becoming significantly scarce. Hence prevention of complications can have a great impact on improving patient outcomes and utilizing hospital resources.

There can be few recognized mechanisms of barotrauma in Covid-19 cases. One of them is alveolar overdistension leading to rupture and barotrauma and the second is a decrease in the caliber of pulmonary vessels increasing pressure gradient causing air leak to the sheath. Positive pressure ventilation leads to an increase in intra-alveolar alveoli. Macklin phenomenon also describes the occurrence of a large pressure gradient between marginal alveoli and lung interstitium leading to barotrauma.