Commentary: While ventilators are still essential for some COVID-19 patients, the pattern of use has changed dramatically.
shows that 25% of all hospitalized COVID-19 patients were placed on ventilators. Today that figure is 5%. There are many causes for the decrease: vaccination, a less severe virus and fewer vulnerable patients. But there is no question that a learning curve and change in practice was part of that equation., which originally cost taxpayers $12 million, were sold for less than $25,000.
In medicine, what seems true today might not be true tomorrow, and no one knows whether it will be true the day after tomorrow. In retrospect, the 2020 controversy over having enough ventilators proved mostly unwarranted and resulted in unnecessary expense. But we couldn’t know that at the time — we had to err on the side of having too many rather than too few ventilators.
Still, the virus threw us surprise curveballs that resulted in dramatic changes in the treatment for hypoxemia in severe COVID-19 pneumonia. Planning for future pandemics is not as easy as it is sometimes portrayed. The takeaway for future pandemic strategists is to factor in a good degree of flexibility — because nature never runs short on curveballs.
Dr. Cory Franklin is a retired intensive care physician. Dr. Robert Weinstein is an infectious disease specialist at Rush University Medical Center.
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