In view of the large number of infected people, especially in view of the large number of patients who will concurrently require intensive care and ventilators for prolonged periods of time, several countries have had insufficient health resources and have had to triage the provision of complex respiratory care. The severely ill require hospitalization in intensive care units (ICUs) and the most severely ill patients need ventilation using respirators and sometimes extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO a type of heart-lung machine). Therefore, these are real and tangible questions of immediate life and death.Ĭoronavirus infections (SARS-CoV-2) can be asymptomatic or may vary in severity, ranging from mild flu-like symptoms and varying degrees of difficulty in breathing to interstitial pneumonia accompanied by severe hypoxemia.
The significance of these tragic decisions is that in the absence of sufficient life-saving resources and skilled staff to simultaneously treat all patients requiring life-saving treatments some severely ill patients will not receive optimal life-saving treatment. The global Coronavirus pandemic has created a severe, difficult and tragic ethical-social-religious-legal dilemma because of the need to make triage decisions for the treatment of severely ill patients requiring ventilation and intensive care.
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