As the new chair of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO), John Fraser, MBChB, PhD, began talking with the group’s members last November about why influenza affects some people worse than others, so much so that they require extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO).

Maybe 10 people, representing a minority of the chapter’s 46 member institutions, said they were interested in exploring that question, Fraser recalled a few months later.

Then, in early January, an ELSO member from China mentioned that “this thing’s happening in Wuhan,” said Fraser, an intensivist and anesthesiologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. “Let’s have a look-and-see, a nice little study, is what I said,” he recalled.

Over a weekend in January, Fraser and some fellow ELSO members wrote the protocol for a database to collect information about “this thing” in Wuhan, which quickly became a thing in South Korea as well.

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