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Abstract Background Severe accidental hypothermia is associated with high morbidity and mortality. Veno-arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VA-ECMO) provides an efficient rewarming method with complete cardiopulmonary support. The use of VA-ECMO for this indication has greatly improved the vital and functional prognosis of patients. Case presentation We report a case of a 46-year-old patient who was treated for severe hypothermia with a temperature of 22.4 °C along with initial cardiac arrest, whose progression was favorable after the implementation of VA-ECMO support. Two months after initial cardiac arrest, the patient was reassessed and showed signs of complete recovery with regard to his mental and physical capacities. Conclusions The recent international publications and groups of experts recommend the use of VA ECMO as the gold standard therapy to treat severe hypothermia. Therefore, it seems suitable to update the current knowledge on the topic by analysing the latest international publications. The performance of this technique calls into question ethical and economic factors. Two distinct medical teams tried to identify and regroup prognosis factors in predictive survival scores. They raise the question of the utility of these scores in clinical practice. Indeed, according to which survival rate should we proceed to prolonged resuscitation and implement VA-ECMO? Additional studies will be needed for external approval of these survival scores, and additional reflection by experts will be required.

In late December 2019, SARS-CoV-2 was discovered, which is responsible for a new human disease called COVID-19. Among all laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases, 14% were hospitalized, with 2% admitted to intensive care units (ICU) with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) requiring mechanical ventilation [1]. SARS-CoV-2 has spread quickly across the world, with more than one hundred million confirmed cases and more than 2,500,000 dead. In March 2020, the Hospital of Valenciennes had to admit hundreds of COVID-19 patients, and its capacity was almost exceeded [2]. More recently, in France, thousands of critically ill patients had to be admitted to ICUs. In Europe, the next wave of COVID-19 pandemic could be more severe than the first one, and we already know that, in the case of increasing numbers of critically ill, some of them will die as a result of the unavailability of mechanical ventilators [3]. This shortage may be lessened if one ventilator could service more than one patient. The main worry is that this concept could be not useful and systematically deleterious for the patient. Some concepts have already been proposed to ventilate differently two circuits with a single ventilator, with several limitations like the lack of individualization of ventilation of each circuit [4–6]. More recently, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Clarke et al. [7] described a new concept able to deliver specific ventilation for two different lung tests with a single ventilator. Again, Levin et al. [8] have recently shown that a similar concept of differential ventilation using a single ventilator with flow control valves is feasible in humans.