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Review
. 2020 Jul;42(7):1392-1396.
doi: 10.1002/hed.26214. Epub 2020 Apr 29.

Tracheotomy in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

Hunter Skoog  1 , Kirk Withrow  1 , Harishanker Jeyarajan  1 , Benjamin Greene  1 , Hitesh Batra  2 , Daniel Cox  3 , Albert Pierce  4 , Jessica W Grayson  1 , William R Carroll  1
Affiliations
Review

Tracheotomy in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

Hunter Skoog et al. Head Neck. 2020 Jul.

Abstract

The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV-2 pandemic continues to produce a large number of patients with chronic respiratory failure and ventilator dependence. As such, surgeons will be called upon to perform tracheotomy for a subset of these chronically intubated patients. As seen during the SARS and the SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks, aerosol-generating procedures (AGP) have been associated with higher rates of infection of medical personnel and potential acceleration of viral dissemination throughout the medical center. Therefore, a thoughtful approach to tracheotomy (and other AGPs) is imperative and maintaining traditional management norms may be unsuitable or even potentially harmful. We sought to review the existing evidence informing best practices and then develop straightforward guidelines for tracheotomy during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This communication is the product of those efforts and is based on national and international experience with the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the SARS epidemic of 2002/2003.

Keywords: COVID; critical care; head and neck surgery; otolaryngology; tracheostomy.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Tracheotomy guidelines in the COVID‐19 era [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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