“Friend or Foe” — Oxygen Therapy for COVID-19 patients, a New Perspective

Abstract

In late December 2019, a disease known as Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19), later known to be caused by a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was first reported from Wuhan, China. In an unprecedented event, this highly contagious disease would become a global pandemic. The hospitalized patients are being treated mainly for a typical viral pneumonia with supplemental oxygen therapy and mechanical ventilation. This treatment ought to be helpful for COVID-19 patients, but the clinical outcomes are, thus far, not very promising. Therefore, there is an urgent need of new insights towards the pathophysiology of COVID-19 leading to the basis for better and more effective treatments. Recent research hints that SARS-CoV-2 may impair hemoglobin’s ability to perform gaseous exchange, which leads to oxidative stress. In this complex situation, oxygen therapy could only be of limited utility and would rather aggravate the oxidative stress and its’ downstream pathologies. We propose here that ideally these patients should be treated with exchange blood transfusions for immediate relief and resuscitation.