PLoS ONE (Jan 2020)

Treatment of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the COVID-19 era: A 100 days experience from the Lombardy region.

  • Enrico Baldi,
  • Giuseppe Maria Sechi,
  • Claudio Mare,
  • Fabrizio Canevari,
  • Antonella Brancaglione,
  • Roberto Primi,
  • Alessandra Palo,
  • Enrico Contri,
  • Vincenza Ronchi,
  • Giorgio Beretta,
  • Francesca Reali,
  • Pier Paolo Parogni,
  • Fabio Facchin,
  • Ugo Rizzi,
  • Daniele Bussi,
  • Simone Ruggeri,
  • Luigi Oltrona Visconti,
  • Simone Savastano,
  • all the Lombardia CARe researchers

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241028
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15, no. 10
p. e0241028

Abstract

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IntroductionAn increase in the incidence of OHCA during the COVID-19 pandemic has been recently demonstrated. However, there are no data about how the COVID-19 epidemic influenced the treatment of OHCA victims.MethodsWe performed an analysis of the Lombardia Cardiac Arrest Registry comparing all the OHCAs occurred in the Provinces of Lodi, Cremona, Pavia and Mantua (northern Italy) in the first 100 days of the epidemic with those occurred in the same period in 2019.ResultsThe OHCAs occurred were 694 in 2020 and 520 in 2019. Bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) rate was lower in 2020 (20% vs 31%, pConclusionCompared to 2019, during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak we observed a lower attitude of laypeople to start CPR, while resuscitation attempts by BLS and ALS staff were not influenced by suspected/confirmed infection, even at univariable analysis.